7 ms·

Every year I wonder if Americans will finally learn how to build some proper trains. Not like hyperloop or self-driving fantasies, not fake trains like dedicat

• mlvljr 10y ago
  coz econumy!
• dashundchen 10y ago
  Two rail specific issues I know of that drive up project costs (without getting into the blown up infrastructure costs we seem to face): * Extremely heavy rail cars, some almost twice the weight as their European counterparts. This is determined by Federal Rail Administration requirements about crash safety with freight trains on shared lines. Crash safety here being just throwing more steel in the cars. This drives up design, capital, fuel costs, and rail maintenance, not to mention severely limits train performance. Compare two trainsets from around when Amtrak's Acela was built: German Siemens Velaro E; Top design speed: 350 km/h Weight: 439 tons Capacity: 405 passengers Acela Express: Top design speed: 266 km/h Weight: 565 tons Capacity: 304 passengers * FRA mandated "Buy American" requirement, which forces federally funded rail projects to buy equipment manufactured in America. Of course we long ago killed off our domestic passenger rail industry, so now projects must pay European manufacturers to tool essentially temporary factories to build already overpriced rail cars on a project by project basis. Projects can apply to the FRA for waivers for both, such as the case with the California HSR project, but it adds friction. http://observer.com/2013/07/amtraks-fat-expensive-and-slow-new-northeast-corridor-locomotives-arrive-for-testing/ http://observer.com/2013/07/amtraks-fat-expensive-and-slow-n... http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0185 http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0185
  • chrishacken 10y ago
    We need to let technical people make technical decisions. The things I'm reading are ridiculous. ``` “All my engineers thought the rules were nuts,” he said, calling the Acela a “high-velocity bank vault.” The Federal Railroad Administration likes to think that America is special, and so our trains have to be special too. ```
    • johansch 10y ago
      > The Federal Railroad Administration likes to think that America is special The concept of "American exceptionalism" is a strange thing that still has lots of real-world consequences, apparently.
    • TorKlingberg 10y ago
      I think there is an affect where nobody resisted regulation creep because nobody was building a lot of passenger train lines anyway. There is something analogous with city center housing in Sweden. For decades not much was built. The population is fairly stable and many were moving to suburbs anyway. Today, not everyone wants a suburban house, and nobody wants to live in '60s concrete "housing project" exclaves, so central apartment prices and rents skyrocket. But now you cannot build the kind of central flats people want any more, because of decades of accumulated regulations about noise, sun angles, parking quotas, etc. The market is dominated by 50-100 year old buildings that predate the regulations and are very popular.
      • hx87 10y ago
        Same thing here in Boston--three story detached houses, with one apartment per story, are the most popular form of housing here, and yet have been illegal to build for the past 100 years (with a few exceptions) due to being too dense for single-family zoned areas and being a fire hazard. It's odd that there is no "build out of non-flammable materials" exception for the latter.
    • antisthenes 10y ago
      Sounds like a subsidy/payout to the steel making industry to me.
• CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
  As someone who has recently spent a few months in various Western European countries for work: You would be surprised In many urban areas, it is basically NYC. Which is great, and makes getting around easy. But once you get farther out, things dry up fast. And a good comparison would actually be Amtrak and the like on the East Coast of the US. Considerably cheaper (I would guess, off the top of my head, 60% of the cost for a comparable trip). But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time. And a lot of the time, those savings aren't particularly significant once you factor that in. As someone who travels a lot for work, I didn't see a huge difference in how I approached things while working on budgets. Fly to major city nearby and then get a train/rent a car to go to a smaller town (if needed). The former was more of an option, which was nice, but the latter was a lot faster if there were a few connections. And even when there was the option to just do pure train, the amount of time versus savings wasn't worth it. And for personal travel? Even then, a flight was a lot more logical and not a lot more expensive once I factored in vacation hours and the like to handle transit times. In terms of cities? Yeah, we are horrible (although, the UK and Ireland is almost as crap as we are once you get out of London). In terms of general (inter)national travel? A car is a lot less required, but not to the extent that a lot of us would think.
  • ghaff 10y ago
    Pretty much. There's this notion that you can practically teleport around Europe for next to nothing using trains that just isn't true. On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying. The US doesn't have great train systems for the most part but, as you say, in the region that's most comparable to much of Western Europe, the Northeast, it really isn't all that different. ADDED: What you tend not to have in the US is compact walkable towns and small cities once you get out of the large cities. Though I'd also say, that at least in the UK, small towns away from the main railroad lines will have bus service that's probably better than the US equivalent but it may still just be a few times a day.
    • w0utert 10y ago
• crgk 10y ago
  Once you get wherever you wanted via train, you are now pretty much stuck at a train station. So much of America is not walkable, and we don't have great public transportation within cities and towns, so if you arrive somewhere without a car there's not much for you to do. edit: of course, ride sharing helps.
  • gsnedders 10y ago
    But the same is true of flying. Once you get wherever you wanted via a plane, you are pretty much stuck at an airport. The difference, of course, is that airports tend to have sufficient passenger numbers to justify car hire agencies locating there (or at least providing a shuttle), but that case is harder to make as long as there are comparably few trains per day.
    • siquick 10y ago
      I've never once been to an airport that didn't have either a bus or a train link to the nearest city.
    • CPLX 10y ago
      > Once you get wherever you wanted via a plane, you are pretty much stuck at an airport. Adding insult to injury, that airport generally isn't feasibly reachable by public transportation.
• melling 10y ago
  Not going to happen. Americans fight HSR like the plague: http://singularityhub.com/2012/09/04/can-high-speed-rail-compete-with-self-driven-cars-and-all-the-technology-of-the-future/ http://singularityhub.com/2012/09/04/can-high-speed-rail-com... The CA HSR should have been built decades ago. In the meantime, China has built 12,000 miles of hsr, and will double that within 10 years. China is also building maglevs. The Beijing S1 has should be live within months: http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-11/28/content_27504329.htm http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-11/28/content_275...
  • cylinder 10y ago
    The US is a case of "too much democracy." Sometimes you just need to give power to a commission / body and let them do what they need to do. If you need every village, suburb, unincorporated city and "advocacy group" to give votes on any plan, you're going to fail.
• douche 10y ago
  We had trains, and we still do. We just stopped moving people on them, and shifted it all to freight.
  • rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    That is correct. America actually has a remarkable freight rail system. But the vast majority of Americans are not involved directly with freight rail so most people don't think about it.
    • johansch 10y ago
      I think in most of Europe there's a relatively painful 50/50 balance between passenger and freight traffic. The freight trains run mostly at night. The tracks are used really, really hard, which causes maintenance issues. It's quite hard to do track maintenance well when there's a train passing by every 5-10 minutes, 24/7. Maintenance windows can become really expensive.
  • jdmichal 10y ago
    Because at American distances, airplanes are very time-efficient for moving people. And that's today -- they were even more so before TSA. Trains would mostly be effective at covering those distances that are currently "puddle jumper" flights. Things which are an hour flight on a slow prop plane, but which take at least twice as long real-time due to airport and security hassles.
    • gsnedders 10y ago
      I don't think anyone is seriously proposing a US-wide HSR network; the US-wide population density obviously makes that non-viable. There's definitely parts of the US where the population density could easily sustain HSR, though; California from San Diego–Los Angeles–San Francisco is one, and Boston–New York–Philadelphia–Baltimore–Washington is another (quite how far you could stretch that network west is an interesting question, and I don't know enough about current travel trends to comment, certainly Pittsburgh is close enough that travel time-wise it could beat out aviation), as is Miami–West Palm Beach–Orlando for example. What is interesting is it is likely the case that the North East is the only place where there's a sufficient population density in a larger general area that crosses state lines. The problems seem to be frequently the fact that nobody wants a train line near them that doesn't stop near them, whereas current aviation routes simply overfly them, and adding in extra stops completely destroys the business case by making them comparatively slow (v. aviation).
• hx87 10y ago
  Pretty simple actually--our rail system is optimized for freight, not passenger transport while our road and airway systems are the opposite. While this does mean rail transport is dreadfully slow and full of delays (since a car of wheat isn't particularly time-sensitive and doesn't need to go 300 kph), it also means that cargo transportation is incredibly efficient (both financially and energetically) and cheap.
  • mikeash 10y ago
    I was going to make exactly this point. If you look at Europe and say "their trains are so much better!" then you're missing half the picture. They're not better, they're just different. Better in some ways, worse in other ways. Given the size of our country, I'm not at all sure we made the wrong tradeoff here. Being able to cheaply ship goods from coast to coast seems far more valuable than having high speed passenger trains that "only" take a day or two to make that same trip. Certainly, there are some corridors where we ought to to better. DC-Boston and LA-SF, for example, would probably benefit greatly from high-speed rail. But I don't think the idea of ubiquitous passenger trains is really a good one for us, much as I might like to see it.
    • aninhumer 10y ago
      While an interesting observation, I'm not sure this really addresses the point. The conversation was implicitly about passenger rail, and the US is clearly bad at that. Also I can think of a few practical reasons why Europe might have less developed long distance freight rail off the top of my head. Not least the fact that most of Europe is a lot better connected by sea than opposite coasts of the US (especially before the Panama canal was built).
      • mikeash 10y ago
        Our freight system is a big part of why our passenger system sucks, though. Most of our cities see infrequent or nonexistent passenger service because the rails are all tied up with freight.
• smhg 10y ago
  > Like the kind every European country figured out how to do properly While I can't compare to US railways, EU railways have their fair share of issues. There might indeed be a fairly large offer, the structures running them seem to be an organisational mess in many countries. Just some examples I know of: * The Netherlands and Belgium ordered trains that were never able to drive [1]. * Rail is sometimes referred to as Germany's inefficiency secret [2]. * Rail privatisation in the UK isn't very popular [3]. Obviously it isn't all bad. But it also isn't organised properly in many EU countries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyra [2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-series-of-defects-german-rail-s-growing-image-problem-a-706240.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-series-of-defe... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#Impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...
• chrischen 10y ago
  Took me two hours to go from San Francisco to San Jose by public transit, and I had to use an Uber for the last leg because the train for the last segment stopped running (this was for a journey started around 8 PM). Took me two hours to go from Tokyo to Kyoto.
  • ido 10y ago
    I have you beat with 1.5h from midtown Atlanta to east Atlanta via MARTA (subway + 1 or 2 busses, this was about 5-6 years ago.
    • kjs3 10y ago
      Bullshit. Midtown to EAV area is maybe 30m unless there's some major breakdown (which, like every train system, happens). Train south from midtown to Five Points, transfer to east line to Inmann Park and take one of 3 bus lines to your EAV destination. I do this several times a week.
    • ido 10y ago
      There was no breakdown but this obviously depends on where in midtown you come from and where in east atlanta you go to, also just waiting on a bus can be 20-30 minutes per transfer.
• 1024core 10y ago
  I think a part of the problem is that most(?) rail lines are owned by a patchwork of companies. So while you can take an Amtrak from San Jose to LA, it will travel over BNSF and Union-Pacific lines (I think). It may not get right-of-way everywhere, resulting in delays. We need the Federal Government to own the rail lines, just like it owns the highways.
• kjs3 10y ago
  And here's the oh-so-predictable thread-shit on any topic where another country is cited for X to try and make it about how America sucks at X. And typically, it's all handwavy and histrionic and completely lacking in actual facts.