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Two-Thirds of Americans Would Utilize High-Speed Rail If It Was Available

67 points by misnamed 10y ago

ChuckMcM 10y ago
This would seem pretty clear when California voters (notorious for not voting in taxes or bonds) approved the high speed rail project. What was even more interesting were the forces that came out against it and how they have acted.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  I voted for that bond measure, and now I regret it. I'm a little fuzzy on the details at this point, but my recollection is that it was originally planned to include major Caltrain improvements, which they have now given up on.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    The intended improvements have changed, but they're still there. Hopefully we'll end up with electrification and level-loading, which should increase Caltrain people/hour to be the same as a BART line. 38% of tech workers in Palo Alto take Caltrain, just imagine what it could be if Caltrain wasn't running over 100% during rush hour.
  - ac29 10y ago
    Caltrain modernization is already under construction with full electrification and new train sets expected to be complete by 2020 [0]. [0] http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/Modernization.html http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...
- dvanduzer 10y ago
  What would be the equivalence class of Nancy Reagan (or whoever it was) tying speed limits to interstate high funding? Seems we could use something like that for revamping Amtrak.
- gozur88 10y ago
  California voters approved that project because they expected it to be a bit of priming that opened up the federal dollar spigot. If that doesn't actually happen the project will almost certainly be scrapped.
chimeracoder 10y ago
> To be more exact here, 63% of those surveyed stated an interests in utilizing high-speed rail service if it was available. That's asking the wrong question, though. The issue is not so much whether people would, in the abstract, have an interest in using high-speed rail as a hypothetical means of transportation. The first challenge is figuring out where to place the rail - trains can only travel on tracks, so the train routes need to connect highly-trafficked (source, dest) pairs in order to be useful. And the second challenge is figuring out how to do this for a price that justifies the costs. (Even if the project is taxpayer funded, the costs include the opportunity cost - what other projects that tax money could have been spent on). Two-thirds of Americans would use high-speed rail if it connected their home city with their most frequently-visited destination city. But that's not the same as saying that two-thirds would use high-speed rail if it connected, say, LA and SF, or NYC and DC. The question is, would enough people use those routes in order for the project to justify its costs? The question isn't entirely useless - for example, if only 1% of the country demonstrated an interest in using high-speed rail, we could probably stop there. (Even if it connected NYC and LA, the two largest cities, there's no way the traffic would cover the opportunity cost of the project). But as stated, this survey tells us pretty much nothing new - we already knew that there's an abstract interest in high-speed rail, but what we don't know is how to convince people that we have a cost-effective way of building out the tracks between the most-important destination hubs[0]. [0] We sort of do know what the most-important destination hubs are, because it's not that different from the most-trafficked Amtrak routes and flight routes in a given region. Yes, you can make the argument that high-speed rail rail should serve the areas that aren't currently well-served by other transportation means, but keep in mind that those also tend to be the less-populated areas to begin with, which means that the challenge of recouping the costs of the project is even greater.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I was going to write more or less the same thing. The headline is very misleading. Sure, I'd be interested in viable, reasonably cost effective high speed rail that connected cities I travel between. (Which doesn't really describe any of the routes on that map.) I like trains. I rarely travel between Boston and Manhattan any other way. But there just aren't a lot of routes in the US between high traffic city pairs where travel time at realistic high speed rail speeds with appropriate intermediate stops are going to get you to the 4 hour or so range that you have to hit to be viable. Few business travelers are going to take an 8 hour+ train trip when there's a 2 hour flight option.
PaulHoule 10y ago
It would help people who fly too. One thing that struck me living in Europe was that flying was much cheaper and easier and I think competition with rail was a big part.
rmason 10y ago
My father told me a story about discontinuing a street car line (called an interurban) in a town North of Detroit. There was a hearing at city hall and hundreds of villagers turned out. Dozens of people made the case to keep the line. Finally the street car company's lawyer got up and made the business case for discontinuing the line. He concluded by asking the crowd how many of you used our company's street car to get to this meeting? Not a single hand went up. It's easy to tell a pollster you're for high speed rail but how many will actually buy a ticket? Perhaps they should ask for them to prepay for a ticket?
- mikeash 10y ago
  Did the streetcar line serve city hall, and did it run reasonably often at the time the meeting was set to end? Depending on the answers, there are two totally different lessons to be drawn there!
  - bsbechtel 10y ago
    That's the issue with public transportation in the US. Cars, gas, and land are cheap, therefore personal transportation is cheaper than public transportation. When it's more affordable to drive into a city and park for free than take a train/bus and be limited to their schedules and locations, personal transportation wins every time, like in the OP's anecdote. Personally, I think this is a wonderful thing, but I also know public transportation services in other countries are much better at overcoming these problems than in the US.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      There are two competing issues, one is what you say, and the other is that public transportation often sucks pretty hard. Some places lean heavily one way, and some lean heavily the other way. My point is that without knowing this context, we don't know if that story is an example of "people say they want public transportation but don't actually use it" or if it's an example of "public transportation is set up badly and then the people who run it are somehow surprised when people don't use it."
  - 10y ago
kposehn 10y ago
Two criticisms of the map: 1. A high speed line down the California coast is totally impractical. Mountains, granite and huge grade changes make for an expensive proposition. 2. The broken links in the midwest between the network in Texas/Oklahoma with that stemming from Chicago is silly. Their are mothballed Rights-of-Way there that are perfect alignments for HSR. Outside that, I'm still very much interested in a way to make HSR work in a number of areas for the US.
toddrew 10y ago
Do two-thirds of Americans travel enough to use high-speed rail?
- bluedino 10y ago
  I currently use rail once, maybe twice a year. Being faster could possibly make impact on that. It's a 4 hour train ride to Chicago but it's a 2 hour drive to Detroit or Cincinnati. In theory if the train was twice as fast, becoming the same 2 hour ride, I'd be more likely to visit Chicago more for one-day or even a single evening event.
jessaustin 10y ago
Truly, the subjunctive tense is dead.
slg 10y ago
Years ago I thought the idea of regional high speed rail lines in the US was a great idea, but I think the time for that has come and gone. The future seems to be clearly moving towards autonomous cars (and buses one presumes). Why sink billions into high speed rail when on our current pace it will be only a couple decades before we have all electric cars powered by solar and other clean energy sources that are 90 something percent autonomous? I think most people would easily choose a 5 hr autonomous car ride from LA to SF with complete freedom of movement in both cities compared to a 2 hr train ride with possibly a couple hours in both cities dealing with connections getting you to your specific destinations.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  This completely excludes "walkable cities" out of the equation. If everyone is moving around on their autonomous vehicles that means that the entire city is criss-crossed with wide roads that take up tons of space, instead of dense walkable city centers with big transit corridors. Compare LA and SF to NYC and MTL.
  - hodwik 10y ago
    The personal autonomous car is just the first, simplest version of the autonomous vehicles. It won't be long before much smaller, short-distance, rentable systems come out -- self-balancing cycles that convert to cycle-trains, and so forth. As autonomous vehicles makes roads much safer, two-wheel systems that are currently too dangerous will become much safer, and much more desirable. As people are less inclined to own their own vehicle, and as delivery systems are more common, there will be less incentive to own a large car. People will rent two-wheel autonomous bikes instead of four-wheel autonomous cars, if its going to cost half as much. The profit motive alone will solve these issues.
  - slavik81 10y ago
    I lived next to a commercial area. You'd think it would have been very walkable with a grocery store across the street, a rec centre just a block away, and tonnes of useful businesses. But the biggest problem I had walking anywhere was the vast amount of surface parking surrounding every business. It was a few minutes just to walk across the grocery store parking lot. Autonomous vehicles would mean valet parking for everyone, which in turn means that we don't need to surround every business with vast fields of parking spaces. Yeah, the parking needs to still go somewhere, but at least you can put it off in a corner somewhere and most of it can be walkable.
freditup 10y ago
There was a previous article[0]/discussion[1] on HN that contained a similar map of proposed high speed rail lines. This previous map made less sense because it encouraged building out new HSR lines across the vast expanses on the American midwest. I like this new map better though - HSR makes the most sense for medium-distant transit. The Mid-Atlantic/New England area is a perfect example of a region where a lot of mid-distance travel happens. The current rail lines are okay but not fantastic and improved lines would be a positive for travelers. [0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-for-america.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-f... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506446
WalterBright 10y ago
I'd prefer a more modest speed rail that went from where I am to somewhere I want to go. It does no good at all to travel at high speeds somewhere else, when all that saved time is more than lost trying to get from else to where I want to go. I'd even prefer slower rail to my car, because I can read on the train, and I don't have to spend 5-10 min parking.
wahsd 10y ago
Bullshit! I will believe it when 2/3 or Americans put $1,000 or so deposit towards a high speed rail system.
nraynaud 10y ago
Be weary of statistics asking people what they might do if something were available vs what they actually do when it's there. Because then you have to factor in the schedules, the ticket price, etc. It doesn't cost anything to answer yes to a poll, it's a bit more complicated when it's time to plan a trip and shell the money out.
wahsd 10y ago
It really kind of fascinates me why people are so obsessed with rail and high speed rail. What are the emotional reasons for it, because there are no rational and reasonable arguments for it that can't be refuted. It makes absolutely no sense and strikes me as another one of those examples of obsessive thoughts and ideal people have these days. It's like all the shitty education we subjected people of roughly <35 years old to are starting to bear shitty rotten and mutated fruits.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Oh, there have been train fans for a very long time. And IMO rail is a comfortable way to travel for certain distances--especially given what a pain airports can be these days. But HSR is really expensive to build and distances and geography in the US make it hard to justify.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    It may be hard to justify a national high speed rail network, but the coasts easily have enough population density to make it work on a regional basis. The big problem with rail in the US, at this point, is you'd have to build out an enormous number of track miles to make the system actually work for people who wanted to use it, and that's going to cost a lot of money and displace a lot of people.
- mikeash 10y ago
  High-speed rail is the best way to travel intermediate distances, say 200-1000 miles. In this realm, it's faster than air travel overall (because you have much less security nonsense and getting to the train station is much faster than getting to the airport) and it's far more comfortable. I must know, how do you refute that?
  - wahsd 10y ago
    Well, I can assure you that if train ridership increases, the risk will increase as a function of the attack vector and the threat by muslims. As that risk profile increases, so will the "security nonsense" and difficulty getting there increase. Also, the degree of expedience at which airports function leaves a lot of room for improvement. There is really little reason why it could not get far more efficient. You seem to also miss the fact that even if you establish a route through 1,000 miles of other people's land and have dispossessed them through eminent domain, and you have blasted your way through ecosystems, you are then stuck with specific routes that can only adapt by scaling throughput of that specific route. Think of it this way, with the pestilence of douchebags overrunning Austin there is no way that rail could have accommodated that growth, let alone even triggered it. What, are you going to build high speed rail infrastructure across multiple states to California to accommodate the flow of douchebags to SXSW and ACL? You'd be lucky to be done before Austin has suffocated itself and the bubble bursts and the next fad has drawn the attention of the pretentious class. I won't disagree that train travel is more comfortable, but hell, you really need to be because the trip, at best, is going to take you three times as long. Because what you are also missing is that we are talking about high speed rail here, we are not talking about fast rail like Acela, which is quite convenient in the NE corridor, but also only because of the population density. But even that train stops on a regular basis, which is also a function of what makes is even remotely not a horrific idea even though it still loses money. The problem with air travel these days is that the Airline industry has essentially captured regulators and legislators and are raping the public with high prices they are colluding on and ever decreasing service and features, also essentially due to collusion and a lack of real competition. Don't get me wrong, I realize that train travel has some benefits and is probably more energy efficient and less polluting, but reality is that it is in no way cost effective let alone adaptable and flexible. The thing that kind of irks me the most about he wide eyed, pie in the sky, rail supporters is that they have absolutely no idea how much it actually costs to provide the kind of level of rail and public transportation infrastructure that you see in Europe. The costs are astronomical both in long term investments and in M&O. There are inklings of how much it really costs, but reality is that no one really have an accurate understanding of its cost because European governments keep that information under lock and key, lest the rabble find out how much their money is squandered.
sandworm101 10y ago
I'm always confused by the high-speed rail numbers. Exactly how many trains would it take to get 2/3 of the US population using rail? Take the average international-sized airport runway. It can land a 747 every couple minutes. That's hundreds of people every minute. A high-speed rail line cannot take even a fraction of that number. The trains cannot run at speed without significant time/distance between them. That's the limit of one-dimension travel (rail) v the three dimensional world of aircraft. It would take dozens of parallel rail lines to replace even a medium sized airport. While we all might want to use rail for some journeys, I don't see it ever competing with air travel in the US market.
- paulmd 10y ago
  It all depends on the capacity of the train and how frequently it stops. Starting and stopping are the real killers since you need extra spacing (or very long "onramps") to accelerate and decelerate a train. However, one concept is a train that never needs to start and stop. Passengers move onto a separate car that separates from the main train and can decelerate into the station, and then it reaccelerates and attaches to the next train. Conceptually, this allows you to run much larger trains since you don't need to decelerate it every 10 minutes for a stop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIeRrU4_M3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIeRrU4_M3Q This is the original concept. Let's just say I have some doubts about the feasibility of engineering that design in real life, but the concept of detaching cars seems sound to me. Conceptually I do like the idea of the detachable cars being a different type of unit with a higher top speed and better acceleration/deceleration units to assist in the deceleration and overtaking steps. A simpler implementation would be to have self-propelled carriages that combine motors and passenger space, and have the car accelerate and decelerate on a siding. The main train would have to run at a slower speed than the detached car could achieve in order for it to "catch up" but could then accelerate back to top speed once reattached. This would lead to an "oscillating" pattern of distance between multiple trains on the line. Also, at the end of the day a runway is still a "one-dimensional" unit of capacity in the same way that a rail line is. You can have multiple multiple runways or rail lines (which I guess is "two-dimensional" in your definition here) but you certainly can't have multiple decks of runways or land multiple airplanes on top of each other. It's actually perfectly feasible to have rail lines running at multiple depths, many subway stations do it.
jschlemm 10y ago
We certainly need better public transit infrastructure.
ap3 10y ago
Two-Thirds Of Americans SAID THEY Would Utilize High-Speed Rail If It Was Available
Mz 10y ago
Well, they are currently breaking ground on high speed rail in California. We may get this question answered in actual fact in the not too distant future instead of in some hypothetical study. Anyone have any ideas for how to help make it successful? I would love to have better transit options because I have no plans to drive a car ever again.
tamana 10y ago
Altrnste read: One third of Americans would refuse rail even if it were perfect and free.

67 points by misnamed 10y ago

This would seem pretty clear when California voters (notorious for not voting in taxes or bonds) approved the high speed rail project. What was even more interesting were the forces that came out against it and how they have acted.

ScottBurson 10y ago
I voted for that bond measure, and now I regret it. I'm a little fuzzy on the details at this point, but my recollection is that it was originally planned to include major Caltrain improvements, which they have now given up on.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  The intended improvements have changed, but they're still there. Hopefully we'll end up with electrification and level-loading, which should increase Caltrain people/hour to be the same as a BART line. 38% of tech workers in Palo Alto take Caltrain, just imagine what it could be if Caltrain wasn't running over 100% during rush hour.
- ac29 10y ago
  Caltrain modernization is already under construction with full electrification and new train sets expected to be complete by 2020 [0]. [0] http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/Modernization.html http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...
dvanduzer 10y ago
What would be the equivalence class of Nancy Reagan (or whoever it was) tying speed limits to interstate high funding? Seems we could use something like that for revamping Amtrak.
gozur88 10y ago
California voters approved that project because they expected it to be a bit of priming that opened up the federal dollar spigot. If that doesn't actually happen the project will almost certainly be scrapped.

chimeracoder 10y ago

> To be more exact here, 63% of those surveyed stated an interests in utilizing high-speed rail service if it was available. That's asking the wrong question, though. The issue is not so much whether people would, in the abstract, have an interest in using high-speed rail as a hypothetical means of transportation. The first challenge is figuring out where to place the rail - trains can only travel on tracks, so the train routes need to connect highly-trafficked (source, dest) pairs in order to be useful. And the second challenge is figuring out how to do this for a price that justifies the costs. (Even if the project is taxpayer funded, the costs include the opportunity cost - what other projects that tax money could have been spent on). Two-thirds of Americans would use high-speed rail if it connected their home city with their most frequently-visited destination city. But that's not the same as saying that two-thirds would use high-speed rail if it connected, say, LA and SF, or NYC and DC. The question is, would enough people use those routes in order for the project to justify its costs? The question isn't entirely useless - for example, if only 1% of the country demonstrated an interest in using high-speed rail, we could probably stop there. (Even if it connected NYC and LA, the two largest cities, there's no way the traffic would cover the opportunity cost of the project). But as stated, this survey tells us pretty much nothing new - we already knew that there's an abstract interest in high-speed rail, but what we don't know is how to convince people that we have a cost-effective way of building out the tracks between the most-important destination hubs[0]. [0] We sort of do know what the most-important destination hubs are, because it's not that different from the most-trafficked Amtrak routes and flight routes in a given region. Yes, you can make the argument that high-speed rail rail should serve the areas that aren't currently well-served by other transportation means, but keep in mind that those also tend to be the less-populated areas to begin with, which means that the challenge of recouping the costs of the project is even greater.

ghaff 10y ago
I was going to write more or less the same thing. The headline is very misleading. Sure, I'd be interested in viable, reasonably cost effective high speed rail that connected cities I travel between. (Which doesn't really describe any of the routes on that map.) I like trains. I rarely travel between Boston and Manhattan any other way. But there just aren't a lot of routes in the US between high traffic city pairs where travel time at realistic high speed rail speeds with appropriate intermediate stops are going to get you to the 4 hour or so range that you have to hit to be viable. Few business travelers are going to take an 8 hour+ train trip when there's a 2 hour flight option.

PaulHoule 10y ago

It would help people who fly too. One thing that struck me living in Europe was that flying was much cheaper and easier and I think competition with rail was a big part.

rmason 10y ago

My father told me a story about discontinuing a street car line (called an interurban) in a town North of Detroit. There was a hearing at city hall and hundreds of villagers turned out. Dozens of people made the case to keep the line. Finally the street car company's lawyer got up and made the business case for discontinuing the line. He concluded by asking the crowd how many of you used our company's street car to get to this meeting? Not a single hand went up. It's easy to tell a pollster you're for high speed rail but how many will actually buy a ticket? Perhaps they should ask for them to prepay for a ticket?

mikeash 10y ago
Did the streetcar line serve city hall, and did it run reasonably often at the time the meeting was set to end? Depending on the answers, there are two totally different lessons to be drawn there!
- bsbechtel 10y ago
  That's the issue with public transportation in the US. Cars, gas, and land are cheap, therefore personal transportation is cheaper than public transportation. When it's more affordable to drive into a city and park for free than take a train/bus and be limited to their schedules and locations, personal transportation wins every time, like in the OP's anecdote. Personally, I think this is a wonderful thing, but I also know public transportation services in other countries are much better at overcoming these problems than in the US.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    There are two competing issues, one is what you say, and the other is that public transportation often sucks pretty hard. Some places lean heavily one way, and some lean heavily the other way. My point is that without knowing this context, we don't know if that story is an example of "people say they want public transportation but don't actually use it" or if it's an example of "public transportation is set up badly and then the people who run it are somehow surprised when people don't use it."
- 10y ago

kposehn 10y ago

Two criticisms of the map: 1. A high speed line down the California coast is totally impractical. Mountains, granite and huge grade changes make for an expensive proposition. 2. The broken links in the midwest between the network in Texas/Oklahoma with that stemming from Chicago is silly. Their are mothballed Rights-of-Way there that are perfect alignments for HSR. Outside that, I'm still very much interested in a way to make HSR work in a number of areas for the US.

toddrew 10y ago

Do two-thirds of Americans travel enough to use high-speed rail?

bluedino 10y ago
I currently use rail once, maybe twice a year. Being faster could possibly make impact on that. It's a 4 hour train ride to Chicago but it's a 2 hour drive to Detroit or Cincinnati. In theory if the train was twice as fast, becoming the same 2 hour ride, I'd be more likely to visit Chicago more for one-day or even a single evening event.

jessaustin 10y ago

Truly, the subjunctive tense is dead.

slg 10y ago

Years ago I thought the idea of regional high speed rail lines in the US was a great idea, but I think the time for that has come and gone. The future seems to be clearly moving towards autonomous cars (and buses one presumes). Why sink billions into high speed rail when on our current pace it will be only a couple decades before we have all electric cars powered by solar and other clean energy sources that are 90 something percent autonomous? I think most people would easily choose a 5 hr autonomous car ride from LA to SF with complete freedom of movement in both cities compared to a 2 hr train ride with possibly a couple hours in both cities dealing with connections getting you to your specific destinations.

RodericDay 10y ago
This completely excludes "walkable cities" out of the equation. If everyone is moving around on their autonomous vehicles that means that the entire city is criss-crossed with wide roads that take up tons of space, instead of dense walkable city centers with big transit corridors. Compare LA and SF to NYC and MTL.
- hodwik 10y ago
  The personal autonomous car is just the first, simplest version of the autonomous vehicles. It won't be long before much smaller, short-distance, rentable systems come out -- self-balancing cycles that convert to cycle-trains, and so forth. As autonomous vehicles makes roads much safer, two-wheel systems that are currently too dangerous will become much safer, and much more desirable. As people are less inclined to own their own vehicle, and as delivery systems are more common, there will be less incentive to own a large car. People will rent two-wheel autonomous bikes instead of four-wheel autonomous cars, if its going to cost half as much. The profit motive alone will solve these issues.
- slavik81 10y ago
  I lived next to a commercial area. You'd think it would have been very walkable with a grocery store across the street, a rec centre just a block away, and tonnes of useful businesses. But the biggest problem I had walking anywhere was the vast amount of surface parking surrounding every business. It was a few minutes just to walk across the grocery store parking lot. Autonomous vehicles would mean valet parking for everyone, which in turn means that we don't need to surround every business with vast fields of parking spaces. Yeah, the parking needs to still go somewhere, but at least you can put it off in a corner somewhere and most of it can be walkable.

freditup 10y ago

There was a previous article[0]/discussion[1] on HN that contained a similar map of proposed high speed rail lines. This previous map made less sense because it encouraged building out new HSR lines across the vast expanses on the American midwest. I like this new map better though - HSR makes the most sense for medium-distant transit. The Mid-Atlantic/New England area is a perfect example of a region where a lot of mid-distance travel happens. The current rail lines are okay but not fantastic and improved lines would be a positive for travelers. [0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-for-america.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-f... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506446

WalterBright 10y ago

I'd prefer a more modest speed rail that went from where I am to somewhere I want to go. It does no good at all to travel at high speeds somewhere else, when all that saved time is more than lost trying to get from else to where I want to go. I'd even prefer slower rail to my car, because I can read on the train, and I don't have to spend 5-10 min parking.

wahsd 10y ago

Bullshit! I will believe it when 2/3 or Americans put $1,000 or so deposit towards a high speed rail system.

nraynaud 10y ago

Be weary of statistics asking people what they might do if something were available vs what they actually do when it's there. Because then you have to factor in the schedules, the ticket price, etc. It doesn't cost anything to answer yes to a poll, it's a bit more complicated when it's time to plan a trip and shell the money out.

wahsd 10y ago

It really kind of fascinates me why people are so obsessed with rail and high speed rail. What are the emotional reasons for it, because there are no rational and reasonable arguments for it that can't be refuted. It makes absolutely no sense and strikes me as another one of those examples of obsessive thoughts and ideal people have these days. It's like all the shitty education we subjected people of roughly <35 years old to are starting to bear shitty rotten and mutated fruits.

ghaff 10y ago
Oh, there have been train fans for a very long time. And IMO rail is a comfortable way to travel for certain distances--especially given what a pain airports can be these days. But HSR is really expensive to build and distances and geography in the US make it hard to justify.
- gozur88 10y ago
  It may be hard to justify a national high speed rail network, but the coasts easily have enough population density to make it work on a regional basis. The big problem with rail in the US, at this point, is you'd have to build out an enormous number of track miles to make the system actually work for people who wanted to use it, and that's going to cost a lot of money and displace a lot of people.
mikeash 10y ago
High-speed rail is the best way to travel intermediate distances, say 200-1000 miles. In this realm, it's faster than air travel overall (because you have much less security nonsense and getting to the train station is much faster than getting to the airport) and it's far more comfortable. I must know, how do you refute that?
- wahsd 10y ago
  Well, I can assure you that if train ridership increases, the risk will increase as a function of the attack vector and the threat by muslims. As that risk profile increases, so will the "security nonsense" and difficulty getting there increase. Also, the degree of expedience at which airports function leaves a lot of room for improvement. There is really little reason why it could not get far more efficient. You seem to also miss the fact that even if you establish a route through 1,000 miles of other people's land and have dispossessed them through eminent domain, and you have blasted your way through ecosystems, you are then stuck with specific routes that can only adapt by scaling throughput of that specific route. Think of it this way, with the pestilence of douchebags overrunning Austin there is no way that rail could have accommodated that growth, let alone even triggered it. What, are you going to build high speed rail infrastructure across multiple states to California to accommodate the flow of douchebags to SXSW and ACL? You'd be lucky to be done before Austin has suffocated itself and the bubble bursts and the next fad has drawn the attention of the pretentious class. I won't disagree that train travel is more comfortable, but hell, you really need to be because the trip, at best, is going to take you three times as long. Because what you are also missing is that we are talking about high speed rail here, we are not talking about fast rail like Acela, which is quite convenient in the NE corridor, but also only because of the population density. But even that train stops on a regular basis, which is also a function of what makes is even remotely not a horrific idea even though it still loses money. The problem with air travel these days is that the Airline industry has essentially captured regulators and legislators and are raping the public with high prices they are colluding on and ever decreasing service and features, also essentially due to collusion and a lack of real competition. Don't get me wrong, I realize that train travel has some benefits and is probably more energy efficient and less polluting, but reality is that it is in no way cost effective let alone adaptable and flexible. The thing that kind of irks me the most about he wide eyed, pie in the sky, rail supporters is that they have absolutely no idea how much it actually costs to provide the kind of level of rail and public transportation infrastructure that you see in Europe. The costs are astronomical both in long term investments and in M&O. There are inklings of how much it really costs, but reality is that no one really have an accurate understanding of its cost because European governments keep that information under lock and key, lest the rabble find out how much their money is squandered.

sandworm101 10y ago

I'm always confused by the high-speed rail numbers. Exactly how many trains would it take to get 2/3 of the US population using rail? Take the average international-sized airport runway. It can land a 747 every couple minutes. That's hundreds of people every minute. A high-speed rail line cannot take even a fraction of that number. The trains cannot run at speed without significant time/distance between them. That's the limit of one-dimension travel (rail) v the three dimensional world of aircraft. It would take dozens of parallel rail lines to replace even a medium sized airport. While we all might want to use rail for some journeys, I don't see it ever competing with air travel in the US market.

paulmd 10y ago
It all depends on the capacity of the train and how frequently it stops. Starting and stopping are the real killers since you need extra spacing (or very long "onramps") to accelerate and decelerate a train. However, one concept is a train that never needs to start and stop. Passengers move onto a separate car that separates from the main train and can decelerate into the station, and then it reaccelerates and attaches to the next train. Conceptually, this allows you to run much larger trains since you don't need to decelerate it every 10 minutes for a stop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIeRrU4_M3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIeRrU4_M3Q This is the original concept. Let's just say I have some doubts about the feasibility of engineering that design in real life, but the concept of detaching cars seems sound to me. Conceptually I do like the idea of the detachable cars being a different type of unit with a higher top speed and better acceleration/deceleration units to assist in the deceleration and overtaking steps. A simpler implementation would be to have self-propelled carriages that combine motors and passenger space, and have the car accelerate and decelerate on a siding. The main train would have to run at a slower speed than the detached car could achieve in order for it to "catch up" but could then accelerate back to top speed once reattached. This would lead to an "oscillating" pattern of distance between multiple trains on the line. Also, at the end of the day a runway is still a "one-dimensional" unit of capacity in the same way that a rail line is. You can have multiple multiple runways or rail lines (which I guess is "two-dimensional" in your definition here) but you certainly can't have multiple decks of runways or land multiple airplanes on top of each other. It's actually perfectly feasible to have rail lines running at multiple depths, many subway stations do it.

jschlemm 10y ago

We certainly need better public transit infrastructure.

ap3 10y ago

Two-Thirds Of Americans SAID THEY Would Utilize High-Speed Rail If It Was Available

Mz 10y ago

Well, they are currently breaking ground on high speed rail in California. We may get this question answered in actual fact in the not too distant future instead of in some hypothetical study. Anyone have any ideas for how to help make it successful? I would love to have better transit options because I have no plans to drive a car ever again.

tamana 10y ago

Altrnste read: One third of Americans would refuse rail even if it were perfect and free.