7 ms·

My understanding is that the reason the US doesn't have better rail service is because the auto industry lobbies the government to direct subsidies toward roads

by yosito 9y ago

My understanding is that the reason the US doesn't have better rail service is because the auto industry lobbies the government to direct subsidies toward roads rather than railways. I've seen many cities wanting to improve commuter rail services, but until we get rid of the auto industry's influence, this is an uphill battle.

Aloha 9y ago
Rail service isn't practicable in most of the country, even at 200 miles an hour, NY to Chicago is still a long long trip.
- remarkEon 9y ago
  I would gladly spend the hours I spend dealing with the mess of airport travel on a train instead.
- PakG1 9y ago
  How long is it by car? If the only other option is by plane, I can imagine high speed rail being a good alternative, even if it takes longer than plane. See what long-distance rail looks like in places where it works, like Europe, China, even dare I say Canada.
  - freeone3000 9y ago
    It's a 12 hour drive.
- krallja 9y ago
  At 200 miles an hour, NY to Chicago is less than four hours. It takes about an hour total for transportation between downtowns and the airports; you need to be at the airport about an hour ahead of your flight; the flight itself is 2 and a half hours. So, a 200mph train would be _faster_ for most travelers.
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    > At 200 miles an hour, NY to Chicago is less than four hours. Assuming you can a) maintain that speed the entire length and b) there are no stops along the route. A long-distance point-to-point HSR system is simply not cost-effective, particularly when you've got a geographic barrier like the Appalachians. That's what makes Chicago so problematic for HSR: the Midwest ends up being a region where no city is particularly close to being "on the way" between any other city pairing.
    - Johnny555 9y ago
      Osaka to Fukuoka in Japan is about 2.5 hours by Shinkansen high speed train with 6 stops. Chicago to NYC is about twice that distance, so 5 hours should be obtainable
      - jcranmer 9y ago
        The question is what the situation on the ground looks like. The short distance for NY/Chicago is around 800mi following more or less I-80. The problem with that route is you're missing any viable station between Cleveland and NY (maybe Scranton, but that's sending you in the wrong direction), and there's no real feasible reuse of that route for any other pairings other than NY/Chicago. The "easy" route via the Erie canal (so Chicago/Cleveland/Buffalo/Albany/NY) is 950mi or so, which is simply getting too long to capture traffic. Going via Detroit and Niagara doesn't really add any time, and cutting the trip in half via Toronto would add some time, but you'd get two viable trip corridors out of it, if you could solve border control issues. The most logical route is the Pittsburgh/Philly route, because you get the topography in your favor east of Harrisburg, reuse of corridor (Pittsburgh, Philly, and Harrisburg are all en route, not to mention the wye at Pittsburgh gives you basically Chicago/NYC and Chicago/DC on the same corridor). But this route is still 860mi, which is hard to keep to 5 hours.
        niftich 9y ago
        To expand this with more detail, NYC-Chicago is between 900 and 1000 miles on existing railroad tracks, depending on which way you go: ~910 miles through Philadelphia -> Harrisburg -> Pittsburgh -> Cleveland; ~960 miles through Albany -> Buffalo -> Cleveland; ~1000 miles through Philadelphia -> Baltimore -> DC -> Pittsburgh -> Cleveland. The route that touches DC is the one that passes through the most valuable intermediate stops, but most of that demand is intra-corridor and doesn't concern Chicago. Furthermore, DC is a logical place to serve as a hub to connect the two corridors: one a high-demand DC-NYC, and one a long-distance Chicago-DC. Since to go into Union Station, you have to double-back, this could be a two-segment train where you'd have one-seat travel between Chicago and NYC, but there would be a mandatory stop in DC. This all sounds good, but the segment between DC and Pittsburgh is awful: it's crowded with CSX freight trains, it's either hemmed in by populated areas or follows river valleys or narrow ravines, and there's much work to be done to bring it up to a state that can host High Speed Rail. Between DC and Pittsburgh, one would basically have to build a dedicated line for High Speed passenger rail. The route through Albany and Buffalo avoids the Appalachians but is forced into the busy Hudson Valley. Route improvements here are expensive. East of Cleveland, the Upstate New York cities along the route simply don't generate enough Chicago-bound demand, nor enough connecting opportunities to make routing this way worthwhile. The route of the old Pennsylvanian Railway through Philly, Harrisburg, Altoona, Pittsburgh is indeed the most logical 'direct' route, both in terms of macro and micro; most of the right-of-way is multi-tracked so even with the heavy Norfolk Southern freight traffic, it'd be competitive; and the route touches Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, all of which can generate local and connecting passengers. But even this route is substandard for High Speed Rail: most of it is in river valleys, where there isn't space for the overly broad, sweeping curves with large radii that are needed for high speed travel. The gist is, between Pittsburgh and the Appalachian Great Valley -- home to Harrisburg and Hagerstown, on the routes going towards Philadelphia and DC respectively -- significant engineering effort (that I wrote about previously [1]) would be needed to cut down on travel time on what would become one of the most profitable segments of the route: between Western PA and the rest of the Northeast Corridor. As for the Midwest, there are no convenient cities west of Cleveland to chain onto the route. Toledo or Fort Wayne are the most logical choices, but Toledo lacks north-south connections currently, while Fort Wayne is out of the way of the direct route and also lacks connections. Chaining them both along with South Bend would be best, but that's a complicated route that adds travel time. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414587
- scythe 9y ago
  NY-Toronto-Detroit-Chicago is possible in theory, which has much closer connections between four very large cities. But international cooperation is low right now for dotard-related political reasons.
  - serhei 9y ago
    I'm not sure that makes sense as a single rail route. If Toronto and Detroit are intermediate stops on a line from NY to Chicago, that would mean the train either goes the long way around Lake Ontario (pointlessly adding travel time) or it goes to Toronto via Niagara and then doubles back west (pointlessly adding travel time for NY-Detroit-Chicago passengers). Really, Lake Ontario makes any NY-Detroit train line much longer than it could be otherwise.
    - AskewEgret 9y ago
      New York to Chicago via Toronto and Detroit is certainly not the most direct route, but it does make a lot of sense in the context of what is already in place. VIA Rail advertises that its Toronto to Windsor service is a great alternative to driving and flying. It is 1 hour slower than flight and about equal to driving. Surely they can make some good improvements. EDIT - I just discovered that Ontario has committed to bring the Toronto to Windsor line to 200 km/h by 2025 and 300 km/h by 2031. A brand-new bridge between Windsor and Detroit has already been approved. Canada is paying for 100% of it, why not add rail capabilities (like the Øresund bridge between Sweden and Denmark)? The Detroit to Chicago Amtrak line runs at > 100 mph for almost the entire length already (paid for by the "car-friendly" state of Michigan). The major bottlenecks are two counties in Indiana that Pence hates. With him in Washington, he might still find a way to block construction, but then again he might be too busy to get involved in such piddly things anymore. So basically, you just need to find a good way to speed up the current New York to Toronto Amtrak, which is 12.5 hours to go 350 miles!
      - jcranmer 9y ago
        Putting rail over the new Detroit/Windsor bridge isn't a particularly good idea (you're not really connecting the stations), but actually crossing the river (neither the Saint Clair nor the Niagara) isn't the problem. The hard problem is solving the border control issue.
- niftich 9y ago
  The US is a tough place to build out High Speed Rail because: - the dense cities with good intra-metro transit are either all already in the Northeast Corridor or somewhere else entirely and too far apart from each other: Chicago is much too far from NYC, DC, San Francisco, Seattle - elsewhere, you find big metropolitan areas that are the right distance apart (~100-200 miles) but are impossibly spread out and have bad transit, such that only a small subset of your potential customers can get to where the station would be, or to where they're trying to go within the metro once they arrive; e.g. Texas Triangle (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston), Florida V (Tampa, Orlando, Miami), I-85 (Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh)
sien 9y ago
The US has a great freight rail network. In the US a greater percentage of goods are carried on rail than in Europe. http://business.time.com/2012/07/09/us-freight-railroads/ http://business.time.com/2012/07/09/us-freight-railroads/ An alternative explanation as to why the US has poor long and medium distance passenger rail is that the subsidy required is not cost effective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
- protomyth 9y ago
  Cargo is profitable and has a bit more flexibility in schedule (often loading at odd hours). Passenger isn’t profitable without a subsidy and requires service employees (on train and off) along with more expensive infrastructure as opposed to buildings owned by clients (e.g. grain elevators). Insurance is also more and B2B is always easier than B2C.
- wbl 9y ago
  And the subsidy for roads is?
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  The farebox recovery ratio for roadways is similarly terrible, gas tax is piss in the wind when it comes to building and maintaining road infrastructure. Up front though, our federal government will happily eat 90+% of the cost for new roadway projects, resulting in said projects seeing ample funding, and older localities ending up with massive infrastructure they can't afford to maintain, let alone replace at the end of its design life (eg: when its starting to approach failure).
  - twoodfin 9y ago
    [G]as tax is piss in the wind when it comes to building and maintaining road infrastructure That’s an exaggeration. Federal and state gas taxes and user fees cover a large fraction (something like 50%) of maintenance and capital costs of highways and local roads, even though 1/6 of the Federal gas tax is redirected to mass transit. If it were politically viable, a 100% user tax/fee scheme could fund 100% of the system with gas prices not too much higher than they were a few years ago. The system would not collapse; EVs and hybrids would just become more popular. Air travel is similar. That is not true of passenger rail of any form in the US today, outside of perhaps the Boston-DC corridor.

by yosito 9y ago

Aloha 9y ago

Rail service isn't practicable in most of the country, even at 200 miles an hour, NY to Chicago is still a long long trip.

remarkEon 9y ago
I would gladly spend the hours I spend dealing with the mess of airport travel on a train instead.
PakG1 9y ago
How long is it by car? If the only other option is by plane, I can imagine high speed rail being a good alternative, even if it takes longer than plane. See what long-distance rail looks like in places where it works, like Europe, China, even dare I say Canada.
- freeone3000 9y ago
  It's a 12 hour drive.
krallja 9y ago
At 200 miles an hour, NY to Chicago is less than four hours. It takes about an hour total for transportation between downtowns and the airports; you need to be at the airport about an hour ahead of your flight; the flight itself is 2 and a half hours. So, a 200mph train would be _faster_ for most travelers.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  > At 200 miles an hour, NY to Chicago is less than four hours. Assuming you can a) maintain that speed the entire length and b) there are no stops along the route. A long-distance point-to-point HSR system is simply not cost-effective, particularly when you've got a geographic barrier like the Appalachians. That's what makes Chicago so problematic for HSR: the Midwest ends up being a region where no city is particularly close to being "on the way" between any other city pairing.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Osaka to Fukuoka in Japan is about 2.5 hours by Shinkansen high speed train with 6 stops. Chicago to NYC is about twice that distance, so 5 hours should be obtainable
    - jcranmer 9y ago
      The question is what the situation on the ground looks like. The short distance for NY/Chicago is around 800mi following more or less I-80. The problem with that route is you're missing any viable station between Cleveland and NY (maybe Scranton, but that's sending you in the wrong direction), and there's no real feasible reuse of that route for any other pairings other than NY/Chicago. The "easy" route via the Erie canal (so Chicago/Cleveland/Buffalo/Albany/NY) is 950mi or so, which is simply getting too long to capture traffic. Going via Detroit and Niagara doesn't really add any time, and cutting the trip in half via Toronto would add some time, but you'd get two viable trip corridors out of it, if you could solve border control issues. The most logical route is the Pittsburgh/Philly route, because you get the topography in your favor east of Harrisburg, reuse of corridor (Pittsburgh, Philly, and Harrisburg are all en route, not to mention the wye at Pittsburgh gives you basically Chicago/NYC and Chicago/DC on the same corridor). But this route is still 860mi, which is hard to keep to 5 hours.
      - niftich 9y ago
        To expand this with more detail, NYC-Chicago is between 900 and 1000 miles on existing railroad tracks, depending on which way you go: ~910 miles through Philadelphia -> Harrisburg -> Pittsburgh -> Cleveland; ~960 miles through Albany -> Buffalo -> Cleveland; ~1000 miles through Philadelphia -> Baltimore -> DC -> Pittsburgh -> Cleveland. The route that touches DC is the one that passes through the most valuable intermediate stops, but most of that demand is intra-corridor and doesn't concern Chicago. Furthermore, DC is a logical place to serve as a hub to connect the two corridors: one a high-demand DC-NYC, and one a long-distance Chicago-DC. Since to go into Union Station, you have to double-back, this could be a two-segment train where you'd have one-seat travel between Chicago and NYC, but there would be a mandatory stop in DC. This all sounds good, but the segment between DC and Pittsburgh is awful: it's crowded with CSX freight trains, it's either hemmed in by populated areas or follows river valleys or narrow ravines, and there's much work to be done to bring it up to a state that can host High Speed Rail. Between DC and Pittsburgh, one would basically have to build a dedicated line for High Speed passenger rail. The route through Albany and Buffalo avoids the Appalachians but is forced into the busy Hudson Valley. Route improvements here are expensive. East of Cleveland, the Upstate New York cities along the route simply don't generate enough Chicago-bound demand, nor enough connecting opportunities to make routing this way worthwhile. The route of the old Pennsylvanian Railway through Philly, Harrisburg, Altoona, Pittsburgh is indeed the most logical 'direct' route, both in terms of macro and micro; most of the right-of-way is multi-tracked so even with the heavy Norfolk Southern freight traffic, it'd be competitive; and the route touches Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, all of which can generate local and connecting passengers. But even this route is substandard for High Speed Rail: most of it is in river valleys, where there isn't space for the overly broad, sweeping curves with large radii that are needed for high speed travel. The gist is, between Pittsburgh and the Appalachian Great Valley -- home to Harrisburg and Hagerstown, on the routes going towards Philadelphia and DC respectively -- significant engineering effort (that I wrote about previously [1]) would be needed to cut down on travel time on what would become one of the most profitable segments of the route: between Western PA and the rest of the Northeast Corridor. As for the Midwest, there are no convenient cities west of Cleveland to chain onto the route. Toledo or Fort Wayne are the most logical choices, but Toledo lacks north-south connections currently, while Fort Wayne is out of the way of the direct route and also lacks connections. Chaining them both along with South Bend would be best, but that's a complicated route that adds travel time. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414587
scythe 9y ago
NY-Toronto-Detroit-Chicago is possible in theory, which has much closer connections between four very large cities. But international cooperation is low right now for dotard-related political reasons.
- serhei 9y ago
  I'm not sure that makes sense as a single rail route. If Toronto and Detroit are intermediate stops on a line from NY to Chicago, that would mean the train either goes the long way around Lake Ontario (pointlessly adding travel time) or it goes to Toronto via Niagara and then doubles back west (pointlessly adding travel time for NY-Detroit-Chicago passengers). Really, Lake Ontario makes any NY-Detroit train line much longer than it could be otherwise.
  - AskewEgret 9y ago
    New York to Chicago via Toronto and Detroit is certainly not the most direct route, but it does make a lot of sense in the context of what is already in place. VIA Rail advertises that its Toronto to Windsor service is a great alternative to driving and flying. It is 1 hour slower than flight and about equal to driving. Surely they can make some good improvements. EDIT - I just discovered that Ontario has committed to bring the Toronto to Windsor line to 200 km/h by 2025 and 300 km/h by 2031. A brand-new bridge between Windsor and Detroit has already been approved. Canada is paying for 100% of it, why not add rail capabilities (like the Øresund bridge between Sweden and Denmark)? The Detroit to Chicago Amtrak line runs at > 100 mph for almost the entire length already (paid for by the "car-friendly" state of Michigan). The major bottlenecks are two counties in Indiana that Pence hates. With him in Washington, he might still find a way to block construction, but then again he might be too busy to get involved in such piddly things anymore. So basically, you just need to find a good way to speed up the current New York to Toronto Amtrak, which is 12.5 hours to go 350 miles!
    - jcranmer 9y ago
      Putting rail over the new Detroit/Windsor bridge isn't a particularly good idea (you're not really connecting the stations), but actually crossing the river (neither the Saint Clair nor the Niagara) isn't the problem. The hard problem is solving the border control issue.
niftich 9y ago
The US is a tough place to build out High Speed Rail because: - the dense cities with good intra-metro transit are either all already in the Northeast Corridor or somewhere else entirely and too far apart from each other: Chicago is much too far from NYC, DC, San Francisco, Seattle - elsewhere, you find big metropolitan areas that are the right distance apart (~100-200 miles) but are impossibly spread out and have bad transit, such that only a small subset of your potential customers can get to where the station would be, or to where they're trying to go within the metro once they arrive; e.g. Texas Triangle (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston), Florida V (Tampa, Orlando, Miami), I-85 (Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh)

sien 9y ago

The US has a great freight rail network. In the US a greater percentage of goods are carried on rail than in Europe. http://business.time.com/2012/07/09/us-freight-railroads/ http://business.time.com/2012/07/09/us-freight-railroads/ An alternative explanation as to why the US has poor long and medium distance passenger rail is that the subsidy required is not cost effective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

protomyth 9y ago
Cargo is profitable and has a bit more flexibility in schedule (often loading at odd hours). Passenger isn’t profitable without a subsidy and requires service employees (on train and off) along with more expensive infrastructure as opposed to buildings owned by clients (e.g. grain elevators). Insurance is also more and B2B is always easier than B2C.
wbl 9y ago
And the subsidy for roads is?
StudentStuff 9y ago
The farebox recovery ratio for roadways is similarly terrible, gas tax is piss in the wind when it comes to building and maintaining road infrastructure. Up front though, our federal government will happily eat 90+% of the cost for new roadway projects, resulting in said projects seeing ample funding, and older localities ending up with massive infrastructure they can't afford to maintain, let alone replace at the end of its design life (eg: when its starting to approach failure).
- twoodfin 9y ago
  [G]as tax is piss in the wind when it comes to building and maintaining road infrastructure That’s an exaggeration. Federal and state gas taxes and user fees cover a large fraction (something like 50%) of maintenance and capital costs of highways and local roads, even though 1/6 of the Federal gas tax is redirected to mass transit. If it were politically viable, a 100% user tax/fee scheme could fund 100% of the system with gas prices not too much higher than they were a few years ago. The system would not collapse; EVs and hybrids would just become more popular. Air travel is similar. That is not true of passenger rail of any form in the US today, outside of perhaps the Boston-DC corridor.