7 ms·

The simple truth is, transportation projects are not created to solve problems but instead of pay off political affiliates, be they donors, family members, poli

The simple truth is, transportation projects are not created to solve problems but instead of pay off political affiliates, be they donors, family members, political parties, or the unions. Democrats have no more interest in high speed rail or energy independence than Republicans and for the same reason. Oh they will pay lip service saying otherwise but you can see the results of all those years they have made their claims and promises. The elected and appointed officials of both parties serve their parties first. The party is more important than any one elected official and certainly more important than the voters. high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world. the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless. In an authoritarian state like China the state can tell people were to live which makes it far easier to put services where those people are. Let alone the one item ignored is that much of the population does not travel long distance and that holds true for many countries. So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do and it makes a great jobs program and political payday as well

polemic 7y ago
> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world. This isn't true. High speed rail is alive and well in Europe. Geography, politics and history are all significant factors that you can't explain so easily. > the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless Highly speculative. Nothing beats rail for capacity to move a lot of people around quickly. > So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do Quite the opposite.
- sandworm101 7y ago
  But there are plenty of chinese infrastructure projects that have languished for lack of use. Look at the olympic venues. Once the novelty of ribbon cutting is over, once the recuring costs start piling up, this project too may slow down.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    Chinese airspace is already incredibly congested and unreliable. They just had to build a new 100-million capacity airport for Beijing because of a lack of capacity at the existing airport. The alternative to not continuing to build up rail is that people start not making trips within China due to the difficulty. (Obvious grandstanding projects like HSR to Urumqi and Lhasa not included.)
    - sandworm101 7y ago
      Rail yes, highspeed rail maybe not. Whether china has the market and will to sustain widespread 1000kph rail is untested.
      - yourbandsucks 7y ago
        6h vs 18h for a trip are two different universes. Sleeper trains are cool and all but a shorter ride is better.
        sandworm101 7y ago
        It is time but also energy. At 1000kph a train (at sea level) has massively more drag than an a380 at altitude. Even on electric, these things may have a greater carbon and financial cost than proponants want to admit.
        yourbandsucks 7y ago
        Gonna have to ask you for a cite on that one. Climbing costs energy, as does lift. Piston engines and electric both get better mileage than turbines. I could see it for a 13 hour flight, maybe. Train tracks don't cross the Pacific, though.
        crimsonalucard 7y ago
        No way. You can't even compare this to US car culture. A combustion engine for every single individual emits way more carbon.
xz0r 7y ago
> the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless. Fully autonomous self driving cars are decades away[0] - assuming 15-20 years that about 20% of one's lifetime, developing rail is only a few years effort. I do not understand how electric cars would doom rail. [0]https://www.businessinsider.in/transportation/cars/experts-say-were-decades-away-from-fully-autonomous-cars-heres-why-/articleshow/70901504.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/transportation/cars/experts-s...
- mntmoss 7y ago
  Electric improves the flexibility of BRT, for one - you can run buses underground with lower ventilation requirements and without running overhead cables. Extrapolate "better BRT" to whole highways and dedicated streets running articulated self-driving buses(a far easier task than open-road self-driving) - and you can achieve a lot of the things that rails do, for cheaper. The things that can't be done with that model, the biggest capacities and the highest speeds, are the things that are most in need of a huge subsidy anyway. Electric is also giving ferryboat transit a new lease on life in terms of energy cost/emissions impact. The SF area fleets have ordered a few electrics already - and they've been expanding service, adding new terminals. It's a return to an older model for regional transit and it has plenty of upsides, with the big caveat of needing a viable coastline. Between those two, I think you have the model for a lot of future transit infrastructure. Regardless I would also not claim rail is "doomed".
jfim 7y ago
> advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless It makes a lot more sense to have a self driving car drive you to the high speed rail station, and then drive you from the train station to your final destination. Self driving cars don't run at 160+ mph, but high speed rail does.
factsaresacred 7y ago
> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel Yes, the 'bygone days' of maglev trains. I don't know if you've ever travelled in Japan or China but the convenience and comfort of high speed rail easily surpasses flying. And in many cases, so does the speed. In most normal countries, rail is critical transport infrastructure. It's not a conspiracy.
- pmontra 7y ago
  Agreed. I regularly use high speed trains for every journey up to 4 hours, maybe 5. I've been on vacation in China in 2015. I preferred the high speed train over the standard delay of one or two hours because of airspace traffic congestion.
- turtlecloud 7y ago
  yep - once u factor in the TSA body shakedown and traffic to airport, then it about evens out air travel.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    > yep - once u factor in the TSA body shakedown and traffic to airport, then it about evens out air travel. That's a problem that will be replicated exactly for boarding a train destined to travel at 278m/s. The consequences for a major security failure on a high speed train are, if anything, more dire than those for even a very large passenger aircraft. An 800,000kg barely-subsonic chain of rigid torpedoes barreling through dense population centres is serious business.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      You can’t really hijack a train to hit a specific building, as you can with a plane.
      - weberc2 7y ago
        > You can’t really hijack a train to hit a specific building, as you can with a train. *as you can with a _plane_
weberc2 7y ago
> The party is more important than any one elected official and certainly more important than the voters. Presumably that's even truer in China (where 'Party' is capitalized), but at least they're getting a high-speed rail out of the deal.
fooblitzky 7y ago
Self-driving and electric cars won't solve traffic congestion. 112 sq ft/person is not efficient for transit.
malandrew 7y ago
> electric cars will doom them regardless. Especially once highway miles are all self driving.
nine_k 7y ago
What makes (high-speed or normal-speed) rail a success is a population density. A train moves a lot of people, that's its point. For it to work, these people need to work close to it, and move along it often. Passenger railways make sense in places where one metropolis is close to another, and to yet another, etc, with suburbs commuting to these cities, too. This is what you see in Europe like Germany / Netherlands / France, this is what you see in central Japan, this is what you see in coastal China; all these places have very high population density, It works to an extent in US Northeast. All these places have dense and working passenger railways. But they are a major investment that needs to be repaid, so they need a lot of use. I don't think I'd pay twice as much to get from NYC to Philadelphia twice as fast (say, 45 minutes instead of 90-100), and even 4 times as fast (say, 20 minutes). It would cost comparable to hiring an small airplane already, because there's no such a mass daily ridership. And most places in the US are much lower density. Airplanes are more economical over large sparse spaces.
- wan23 7y ago
  But on the other hand, if there were a cheapish, fast way to get from say Philadelphia to NYC, I might trade my $3500/mo Manhattan apartment for a $2000 new construction rental in Philly and take the train to work every day. 45 minutes is a shorter commute than many people have from Queens or Brooklyn.
danans 7y ago
> air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world And it has the problem of a massive carbon footprint to go along with it. If we are serious about combatting climate change, we need to find ways to move as people with as much throughput and convenience as airplanes today without burning as much fossil fuel. Given that electric commercial flight is a way off, high speed electric trains are an existing technology to achieve that.

polemic 7y ago

> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world. This isn't true. High speed rail is alive and well in Europe. Geography, politics and history are all significant factors that you can't explain so easily. > the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless Highly speculative. Nothing beats rail for capacity to move a lot of people around quickly. > So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do Quite the opposite.

sandworm101 7y ago
But there are plenty of chinese infrastructure projects that have languished for lack of use. Look at the olympic venues. Once the novelty of ribbon cutting is over, once the recuring costs start piling up, this project too may slow down.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  Chinese airspace is already incredibly congested and unreliable. They just had to build a new 100-million capacity airport for Beijing because of a lack of capacity at the existing airport. The alternative to not continuing to build up rail is that people start not making trips within China due to the difficulty. (Obvious grandstanding projects like HSR to Urumqi and Lhasa not included.)
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    Rail yes, highspeed rail maybe not. Whether china has the market and will to sustain widespread 1000kph rail is untested.
    - yourbandsucks 7y ago
      6h vs 18h for a trip are two different universes. Sleeper trains are cool and all but a shorter ride is better.
      - sandworm101 7y ago
        It is time but also energy. At 1000kph a train (at sea level) has massively more drag than an a380 at altitude. Even on electric, these things may have a greater carbon and financial cost than proponants want to admit.
        yourbandsucks 7y ago
        Gonna have to ask you for a cite on that one. Climbing costs energy, as does lift. Piston engines and electric both get better mileage than turbines. I could see it for a 13 hour flight, maybe. Train tracks don't cross the Pacific, though.
        crimsonalucard 7y ago
        No way. You can't even compare this to US car culture. A combustion engine for every single individual emits way more carbon.

xz0r 7y ago

> the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless. Fully autonomous self driving cars are decades away[0] - assuming 15-20 years that about 20% of one's lifetime, developing rail is only a few years effort. I do not understand how electric cars would doom rail. [0]https://www.businessinsider.in/transportation/cars/experts-say-were-decades-away-from-fully-autonomous-cars-heres-why-/articleshow/70901504.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/transportation/cars/experts-s...

mntmoss 7y ago
Electric improves the flexibility of BRT, for one - you can run buses underground with lower ventilation requirements and without running overhead cables. Extrapolate "better BRT" to whole highways and dedicated streets running articulated self-driving buses(a far easier task than open-road self-driving) - and you can achieve a lot of the things that rails do, for cheaper. The things that can't be done with that model, the biggest capacities and the highest speeds, are the things that are most in need of a huge subsidy anyway. Electric is also giving ferryboat transit a new lease on life in terms of energy cost/emissions impact. The SF area fleets have ordered a few electrics already - and they've been expanding service, adding new terminals. It's a return to an older model for regional transit and it has plenty of upsides, with the big caveat of needing a viable coastline. Between those two, I think you have the model for a lot of future transit infrastructure. Regardless I would also not claim rail is "doomed".

jfim 7y ago

> advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless It makes a lot more sense to have a self driving car drive you to the high speed rail station, and then drive you from the train station to your final destination. Self driving cars don't run at 160+ mph, but high speed rail does.

factsaresacred 7y ago

> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel Yes, the 'bygone days' of maglev trains. I don't know if you've ever travelled in Japan or China but the convenience and comfort of high speed rail easily surpasses flying. And in many cases, so does the speed. In most normal countries, rail is critical transport infrastructure. It's not a conspiracy.

pmontra 7y ago
Agreed. I regularly use high speed trains for every journey up to 4 hours, maybe 5. I've been on vacation in China in 2015. I preferred the high speed train over the standard delay of one or two hours because of airspace traffic congestion.
turtlecloud 7y ago
yep - once u factor in the TSA body shakedown and traffic to airport, then it about evens out air travel.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > yep - once u factor in the TSA body shakedown and traffic to airport, then it about evens out air travel. That's a problem that will be replicated exactly for boarding a train destined to travel at 278m/s. The consequences for a major security failure on a high speed train are, if anything, more dire than those for even a very large passenger aircraft. An 800,000kg barely-subsonic chain of rigid torpedoes barreling through dense population centres is serious business.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    You can’t really hijack a train to hit a specific building, as you can with a plane.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      > You can’t really hijack a train to hit a specific building, as you can with a train. *as you can with a _plane_

weberc2 7y ago

> The party is more important than any one elected official and certainly more important than the voters. Presumably that's even truer in China (where 'Party' is capitalized), but at least they're getting a high-speed rail out of the deal.

fooblitzky 7y ago

Self-driving and electric cars won't solve traffic congestion. 112 sq ft/person is not efficient for transit.

malandrew 7y ago

> electric cars will doom them regardless. Especially once highway miles are all self driving.

nine_k 7y ago

What makes (high-speed or normal-speed) rail a success is a population density. A train moves a lot of people, that's its point. For it to work, these people need to work close to it, and move along it often. Passenger railways make sense in places where one metropolis is close to another, and to yet another, etc, with suburbs commuting to these cities, too. This is what you see in Europe like Germany / Netherlands / France, this is what you see in central Japan, this is what you see in coastal China; all these places have very high population density, It works to an extent in US Northeast. All these places have dense and working passenger railways. But they are a major investment that needs to be repaid, so they need a lot of use. I don't think I'd pay twice as much to get from NYC to Philadelphia twice as fast (say, 45 minutes instead of 90-100), and even 4 times as fast (say, 20 minutes). It would cost comparable to hiring an small airplane already, because there's no such a mass daily ridership. And most places in the US are much lower density. Airplanes are more economical over large sparse spaces.

wan23 7y ago
But on the other hand, if there were a cheapish, fast way to get from say Philadelphia to NYC, I might trade my $3500/mo Manhattan apartment for a $2000 new construction rental in Philly and take the train to work every day. 45 minutes is a shorter commute than many people have from Queens or Brooklyn.

danans 7y ago

> air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world And it has the problem of a massive carbon footprint to go along with it. If we are serious about combatting climate change, we need to find ways to move as people with as much throughput and convenience as airplanes today without burning as much fossil fuel. Given that electric commercial flight is a way off, high speed electric trains are an existing technology to achieve that.