18 ms·

Getting High-Speed Rail Wrong

146 points by luu 5y ago

lainga 5y ago
> Moreover, all lines [of the TGV] are very profitable excluding the cost of fixed capital. Why say this? It's a big capital-intensive project. A nuclear power plant is profitable if you exclude the cost of building the reactor, but that's the problem - you can't exclude it, and breakeven time is a big part of cost-benefit analysis. What was breakeven time for the TGV? That would convince me more.
- timerol 5y ago
  The next paragraph explains the return on capital for the various projects. This varies per-project and whether you include societal benefit or not. From a strictly financial return on capital perspective, the figures range from 15% to 4%, with the new Bordeaux-Toulouse likely to be under that.
- swiley 5y ago
  The US already has tons of rail, it's just only used for freight (often coal.) Maybe that's what they meant?
  - moshmosh 5y ago
    I'd never made the connection between the gradual shuttering of coal plants and freight rail, but wow, that is a big deal. A quick search finds that coal is about 30% of rail tonnage in the US. A bunch more (not looking it up, but if you've ever seen a train, it's clearly also a lot of what they haul) is other fossil fuels. I wonder how they're going to cope with (let's give a very lowball estimate) 40% of their tonnage tapering off over the next few decades. Looks like coal shipped by rail is already way down from its peak, and dropping fast. Looks like they charge a premium for intermodal shipping—may have to cut prices on that to keep volume up.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Coal and other bulk materials are “easy” - one customer on each end. Intermodal is more complicated but at the right price it’ll be competitive with trucking.
- flukus 5y ago
  > Why say this? Because as long as their aren't ongoing operational costs it's enticing to governments to build, they don't care if it loses money overall because they aren't profit driven and have non-monetary goals.
hprotagonist 5y ago
As i understand things at a fairly high level, and particularly w/r/t the northeast corridor, high speed rail in the US has two interlinked technical facts about it that are hard to get over even if we can wave a magic policy wand and make governmental buy-in work several orders of magnitude better: - It's not that "American rail construction is just bad. However, this is not because rail is bad; it’s because the United States is bad.". It's that american rail construction in the northeast is OLD, and we're hosed by the first adopter paradox. - from this, it directly follows that upgrading the rail for high speed use is HARD, because the issue is at least in part down to rail line geometry. AIUI, a fundamental reason you can't go 95mph between Boston and New York is that the railroad tracks have curves in them whose radii have a maximum speed without risk of derailment that's quite low, and to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven. There are other issues too, like local/freight/... sharing the same lines, but that's kind of saying the same thing twice: construction through densely populated Northeast Corridor cities is so impractical that it's hard to see how it could ever happen or be thought of as a particularly good thing if it did.
- cletus 5y ago
  This is exactly right. It's not as simple as just upgrading tracks for high speed. There's only so far you can go around certain turns. There are also likely limits based on how separated the track is from the surroundings. Going 50mph has less of a risk profile than going 200mph. High speed rail is generally elevated and/or fenced off to avoid animals, peoples and objects that would otherwise be deadly. The UK has this problem with old rail too. European rail is quite new, probably thanks in part to the "benefit" of Europe being leveled in the last century. China and Japan have new rail too. Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated. Just look at how many airports there are in the US vs Europe. France, a country of 60M+, has a mere handful of airports. So it's easier to serve more people with less line. Lastly, construction is (now) super expensive in the US. Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being economically viable in the US.
  - jschwartzi 5y ago
    Population clustering actually follows from the way people travel. It's a virtuous/vicious cycle where in the US we've been building in ways that reduce or eliminate the usefulness of high speed rail while countries that have favored rail have been doing the opposite. The US has always heavily-subsidized roads and automobile travel and as a consequence sprawl. I think it's catching up with us socially, economically, and physically. In my opinion focusing on cost versus fares is myopic to the point of insanity. As long as we're laser-focused on the economic viability of rail we'll never see any of the other benefits. We have a responsibility to future generations to not just keep things the same but to make them better, and I think rail does that. If you look around and you dislike your current mode of living, hate your commute, and want to have access to cities, then guess what rail is a solution for all of that. It takes decades to see any real benefit from it though, which is why nobody ever goes for it.
anewaccount2021 5y ago
HSR has become the infrastructure equivalent of an N95 mask - clung to as a culture war totem rather than something of immediate utility. Liberals want nation-spanning HSR but will never ride it; merely funding it is enough to retain the sense of victory over their red-state foes.
bsdetector 5y ago
Cars are too slow, airplanes too inconvenient, long-distance high-speed rail too expensive. Why not all three? Ground-effect airplanes should only take about 4x more energy than a car at the same speed, the track is just cement or even dirt, they're not useful for terrorism, no pilot needed, and they could even be powered electrically if they make stops every hour or two. You could drive onto a carrier and fly at 200 mph to your destination. Basically a slow hyperloop, but you don't need a vaccuum or anything high tech at all. I've asked about this before and nobody has explained why it wouldn't work - maybe it's so obvious it goes without saying. edit: hills could be made more flat but surely would be less problematic than for a train where the track must be almost totally flat, any small object or animal could be flown over maybe even trading speed for height, more energy intensive than high speed rail but construction and maintenance far less so. We can make a computer control system for F-117 but we can't control ground effect? These don't sound like carefully considered objections.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Wind resistance. Airplanes at altitude get a lot less wind resistance. Tracks also need a lot less right of way (width) vs ground effect airplanes which need wings. Rolling resistance is not a big deal for trains (or even cars). It exists, but it is small. The real issues for going faster for both is wind resistance. (maglev is better more for maintenance cost than rolling resistance - at least until we get to hyperloop speeds - if we ever do)
- darksaints 5y ago
  It can and has worked in the past, but only over water. Ground effect planes over land have the problem that land isn't really flat, and ground effect doesn't buffer as well as you might imagine. Even small mounds of dirt can cause an extremely uncomfortable ride. You can think of it like riding in a massive monster truck, but without shock absorbers. You're basically guaranteed to get sick.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Basically a slow hyperloop, but you don't need a vaccuum or anything high tech at all. I've asked about this before and nobody has explained why it wouldn't work Ground effect is unstable and hard to control, incursions on the track would be very dangerous, but most obvious measures to mitigate intrusions interfere with ground effect flight or require bigger rights of way. It would be a slow hyperloop with a much bigger ground footprint (like classical high speed rail), less efficiency than classical high-speed rail, control/safety issues not present in high-speed rail, etc.
darksaints 5y ago
One of the things that so many HSR enthusiasts seem to get wrong about HSR is expectations about non-stop trains between major cities. Successful systems either don't have them at all, or they are extremely limited. Certainly you can do non-stop trains, but the systems that do non-stop trains are all massive money losers. This idea is always met with extreme incredulousness about it because it violates their intuition. "You have to go as fast as possible or it won't compete well with air travel! If I have to stop in Merced for 5 minutes to let a handful of people on or off, I'd rather just fly". The problem is that those handfuls of people, the result of the potential travel between the cartesian product of dozens of cities, adds up. There are number of trade publications that have analyzed passenger patterns on successful systems and have found that the ridership exclusively between major terminal stations typically accounted for ~50% of total ridership, and less than 50% of total revenue. Smaller hops have higher prices and better market penetration because they aren't served by air travel and therefore have no competition. Larger hops between major cities have lower prices simply because they have to compete with air travel. Even in a "perfect" world with non-stop trains, HSR is still going to lose some traffic to air travel, and they won't have all of that massive supplementary revenue from intermediate destination travel. Unfortunately, the idea that we should build a system that isn't optimized for them just doesn't resonate with people. And since high speed rail is now a partisan issue, and those same parties have a sharp urban rural divide, we get two camps: 1) democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops, and 2) rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they would benefit from it greatly, because "socialism". And because of it, I believe American HSR is doomed. It will either get built and lose massive amounts of money, or it won't get built at all.
- bombcar 5y ago
  This is a major point - a high speed rail between Chicago and MSP would allow travel between those two points - but more importantly it would allow commuting travel from points in-between. If you build the rails well, you can run both express service (which skips stops to maintain higher speed) and local service (which stops at most or all stations). I believe the way to solve some of this would be to attack it from multiple directions: 1. Require that future highway construction be "rail-ready" - i.e., leave room and have curves that are friendly to adding rail to the highway corridor in the future. 2. Develop local rail corridors that are "high-speed-rail-ready" - as a connection between two large cities is mainly of interest to a few, but commuter rail to the nearest large city is more obviously valuable. And if designed right it can be made for commuting but still be curved, etc correctly to allow higher speed trains if/when it's finally connected through.
barathr 5y ago
There's a deeper issue, which is that such analyses always treat profitability as the key goal. This is public infrastructure -- it doesn't need to be profitable, just meet some more important public goal. We shouldn't expect that the electric grid be profitable in providing power to rural customers (and, similarly, mail delivery), and providing low-carbon, high-speed, easy-to-use transportation to everyone is an important societal goal.
- admax88q 5y ago
  Public services also have the benefit of being connected to the greater tax pool. If profitability is a goal of a public service, it shouldn't be measured in isolation. If the service causes an indirect increase economic activity it will cause a proportional increase in tax revenue.
- loeg 5y ago
  I think the author touches on this? France seems to include social value in its profitability calculations. (SNCF is the French state-owned railway company.)
Der_Einzige 5y ago
Back in 2012-2013, I did a type of competitive debate in american high school called "policy debate". That year, the topic (which we debate the full year about) involved transportation infrastructure. At the time, my partner and I read an affirmative about how good mass transit is. Randal O'Toole is the primary author of "mass transit is bad" style arguments used against us. It was so prolific that I had a counter piece of evidence titled "O'Toole is a tool" which just tried to character assissinate him. What is he doing still being relavent and stuff? I had judges on my debate circuit that apperently knew him in real life and mentioned at the time that he was old... Edit: for anyone that wants to know O'toole's canadian, extremely liberal equivilent who supports mass transit, I recommend you checkout the work of Todd Litman from the Victoria Transportation Institute. He wrote most of the evidence for "mass transit good" and has publicly feuded with O'toole multiple times.
- barney54 5y ago
  Did you ever try to respond to O'Toole's argument or was it all character assassination?
  - lanternfish 5y ago
    In high school debate, including policy, strategy usually involves reading a bunch of different responses to make your opponent have to frontline (respond to responses) all of them in a tighter speech. Generally, high school debate is not a great forum for legitimist investigation of issues, and should be treated more like an advanced game with a lot of strong and unintuitive meta-strategies.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Libertarians know successful state run trains are they biggest ideological enemy. This is the hill they will die one.
djrogers 5y ago
There's a lot of hand-waving and unrealistic beliefs in this piece with regard to costs. For example: " O’Toole looks at the most expensive few lines possible: Britain’s 345‐ mile London–Scotland HS2 high‐ speed rail line was originally projected to cost £32.7 billion (about $123 million per mile) and is currently expected to cost £106 billion ($400 million per mile). International comparisons of high-speed rail costs exist, and Britain’s costs are by far the worst. " It looks as if California will exceed that cost by quite a bit for it's equivalent length HSR project, if and when it's ever completed. And how does this square with the current reality of the California project costs (estimated to be over $100M, even though it's over a decade for completion, and the budget has already grown >2.5x) " the official Obama-era crayon, at 20,000 km, would be $500 billion at tunnel-free European costs, or maybe $600 billion with 5% tunneling " So we're gonna do the rest of the 19,400 km for only $500bn, when the most recent 600km is costing $100bn?
- hardtke 5y ago
  A good friend of mine works for a large construction firm that has bid on some of the California high speed rail jobs. He said that for much of the work (particularly moving existing utility infrastructure) there are no firms bidding, or at most one firm. They therefore know they can jack up the price to 2-3X normal costs. The work needs to happen in places where there are literally no construction workers, and crews don't want to go to where the work needs to be done since there is other work close to their house.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Where I live, which has a large African-American population, construction workers that I see are overwhelmingly white and many of the unions are notoriously racist (and I don't know about the others). Just notice the people working those jobs around you. How much is that racism costing the US economically? Of course it costs the targets of racism the most: I don't have high-speed rail; they don't have jobs, health care, etc.
    - coredog64 5y ago
ncmncm 5y ago
American bullet trains are hamstrung by America's world leadership in legalized institutional corruption. Any big-ticket, long-term US capital project will be first and foremost a multi-year conduit from the public purse to private pockets, and might only incidentally deliver what was supposedly paid for, at 4x-20x the originally quoted price. The 3x-19x is corruption money. We see this, at various times, in transit tunnels (Big Dig, 2nd Ave Subway), nuke power plants, the embassy complex in Iraq, the Wall, F-35 and other military procurement, manned spaceflight, and California's bullet train fiasco (mercifully killed after shoveling out only the first few $billions of what promised to be a truly massive gravy train). Solar and wind power projects seem momentarily immune to this process, for reasons not exactly clear. Their short terms, clear goals, and simple accounting may leave little scope for massive corruption. Corruption wants projects that deliver a steady flow of cash for at least four years, preferably 10 or 20. There are rumblings about a new $trillion missile program, perhaps to take up the SLS contractors when SLS has to be cancelled in favor of SpaceX Starship at well below 1% of the price. The difference between SLS and Starship illustrates the difference between a program intended mainly to fuel corruption, and one with goals that match the label.
niftich 5y ago
Despite several flaws and uncharitable misrepresentations in his policy analysis, I actually agree with most of O'Toole's conclusions. I post a lot on here about rail, and I disagree with a lot of output from the Cato Institute, but the infrastructure cost of long-distance High Speed Rail in the US would be immense, and the geography of settlement and commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented to take advantage of passenger-only HSR. Americans already do most travel by car and long-distance travel by air, so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier substitute for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but drastically less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel. It's no accident France runs the TGV like an airline, because they work the same way: you get to your destination station, and now what? You need to hop on public transit or rent a car like you would at an airport. But in Europe, a big town is far more likely to have public transit of acceptable quality, frequency, and coverage to solve the last mile problem; all but the most transit-webbed US cities do not. This article exposes some of the flaws and misrepresentations in his analysis, but then contributes its own flaws in turn. One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as "moderate-speed trains" too. Truly High Speed Rail only runs in a dozen corridors in Europe, and the rest of the passenger rail on the continent runs the gamut from decent to atrocious. Buses are flexible, because they can go where the roads already go. One way to get around the last-mile problem is to ensure your destination is likely to be transit-webbed town, or your destination station is very close the location to which you actually want to go. This sounds a lot like commuter rail -- the speed depends on how much you want to spend on infrastructure. In the US, this would mean that lines radiate out from NYC, Boston, DC, Philly, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, SF, Miami, Seattle, Portland... but not any further than an hour or two of travel. The Northeast Corridor is a lucky exception because you have some of the most interconnected cities in the US all in a convenient line. What's most frustrating is that many of both the opponents and supporters of HSR in the US miss the point: the point is to both invest in and subsidize infrastructure and programs that are societally useful and unlock productivity and opportunities. The Cato Institute would prefer a world without subsidies, but that's not appropriate for the sorts of high-cost functions that offer a major benefit to society. Pedestrian Observations would prefer more mobility and transit, but sometimes that transit actually looks like an airplane or bus or subsidized taxis, because it's what makes most immediate use out of the current infrastructure in a way that balances opex with capex.
kingsuper20 5y ago
After reading the article, I can't help but feel that high speed rail is not: . An optimal solution to a problem or . A sexy solution looking for a problem but that it's an integral part of an entire society and lifestyle that some people want to embrace. Serious people-mover rail seems to be an organic part of some countries that are different in 100 (1000? 10,000?) different ways that people would like to emulate The arguments about serious modern rail investment look to be proxy arguments.
- bluGill 5y ago
  HSR was new in 1965. Most people reading this were not even born then. Congress wants to fund something new and exciting not the same old thing with just small upgrades. Of course the next congress will want to fund something different - so nothing will ever happen.
  - dafty4 5y ago
    Yes and that next thing will be tax cuts, thanks to the libertarians. #yesWeCan?
    - bluGill 5y ago
      At least a tax cut lets me use my money in something useful for me. My taxes that have went to CAHSR have nothing useful to show for them. (I don't live in CA, so that is effectively zero, but the point stands) IF CAHSR would be completed it would develop economic growth. The consultants who have made money to date are not growth, they are a zero sum game where they could have been doing something else.
pwned1 5y ago
I really don't understand the argument for high speed rail in the US (outside of the NE corridor). There's nothing magical that's going to make it cheaper (see, e.g., California). The US is huge. High speed rail is absurdly expensive compared to planes, and capacity is nearly nothing compared to planes. So why is it such a focus of obsession? Because it looks cool seems to be the argument that is most prevalent. But the devil is in the details.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  The US may be huge. But regions within the US are not huge. There are at least a half-dozen regions in which high speed trains would make as much, if not more sense than they do in Europe if judged by population density and distances.
  - etrabroline 5y ago
    Why build a train line that only takes you where a bus could, when you could build an airport that connects you to the entire globe?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      Because you want to get somewhere faster than the bus or plane could deliver you. Because the environmental impact of trains is, while controversial, unquestionably less than that of flying. Because trains should be moving at an average of 140mph or so, which is more than twice that of a bus. Because most airports don't connect you to the entire globe in a single hop, so you may as well take the train to the existing one that does.
- wahern 5y ago
  It's chosen because airport and highway expansions also cost many billions, and at least on paper HSR often pencils out. California studies showed that alternatives centered on airport and/or highway expansions without HSR would have also cost tens of billions, and altogether ultimately more than a master plan including HSR. AFAIU the same analysis is true for the NE. CAHSR costs ballooned, but so do highway and airport expansions. The U.S. and many other countries have cost management problems with all large infrastructure projects.
leecarraher 5y ago
Instead of focusing on other countries successes with HSR it may be more applicable to look at our ongoing attempts at high speed rail. The California HSRA has been working toward the goal of HSR in california for over a decade. California has the largest tax revenue in the US and one of the most progressive populations. Despite this, they still are plagued by cost overruns, deadlines, and political opposition.
- adamcstephens 5y ago
  Part of the problem is the insistence and cost of using consultants. This LA Times article from 2019 explains it pretty well. https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-high-speed-rail-consultants-20190426-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-hi...
yongjik 5y ago
At the rate things are going, I wonder if it would be cheaper to just tunnel through most of urban/suburban areas. Seems preferable to building on top of ancient railroads, dealing with all those rich NIMBY assholes, and forever getting stuck with suboptimal path. South Korea built a whole 50km terminal section of HSR in a tunnel[1], starting at the outskirts of Seoul. It only took 3.0605 trillion KRW or about 2.7 billion dollars. SF to San Jose is only slightly farther (~50 mi or ~80 km). [1] https://www.tunneltalk.com/Korea-14Jul2015-Yulhyeon-Tunnel-final-breakthrough.php https://www.tunneltalk.com/Korea-14Jul2015-Yulhyeon-Tunnel-f...
- bombcar 5y ago
  Los Angles is doing tunneling for a subway and there’s tons of opposition and complaining.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    My favorite video on the subject: https://la.curbed.com/2014/9/26/10042166/bev-hills-paper-warns-about-isis-attack-on-unbuilt-la-subway https://la.curbed.com/2014/9/26/10042166/bev-hills-paper-war... Gas explosions and terrorists, oh my!
DominikPeters 5y ago
Lots of intercity bus advocates in the comments; I wonder if those people are frequent users. I’ve always regretted when I’ve chosen intercity buses. They are uncomfortable and cramped, get stuck in traffic, and you can’t properly do laptop work. I once took a flixbus from DC to NY to save $30 over Amtrak - what a terrible decision. (Riding Greyhound is an even more self-hating experience.) The price difference is telling: no one takes a bus when a train is available at the same price.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  I'm not quite as down on busses, but trains really are vastly more comfortable. After a bus ride I am physically tired because I need to engage my core to stay balanced through the bumps and turns. On a train you can actually rest.
  - musicale 5y ago
    I want to like trains, but riding Amtrak a couple of years ago was disappointing. It was significantly more expensive than flying and took days rather than hours (though you don't have to show up 2 hours early for security thankfully.) The train itself was pretty run down compared to what I would have expected given the fare. On the up side, there is lot of space for luggage and stretching out, you can walk around the train, and there was an observation car and a café car (the food being more functional than palatable, but the scenery being rather nice.) So it's kind of like taking a break from reality and hanging out on a train for a few days while it slowly moves toward your destination. So it had its moments, but I'm in no hurry to do it again.
    - r00fus 5y ago
      How long did you travel? Trains sweet spot is a few dozen to a couple hundred miles. Anything longer really should be fulfilled with high-speed rail, or air.
    - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago
      Being in no hurry is a prerequisite for train travel.
toddmorey 5y ago
Randal O'Toole has been crashing rail conversations for years, always with wrong and misleading facts. It's not like he doesn't know when he's off (like his argument about the topography of Japan). He just bends the data however he can to support his anti-rail argument. Rail doesn't always make sense and rail projects can absolutely be poorly managed. But O'Toole adds nothing but noise to the conversation.
rtpg 5y ago
High-speed rail feels like such a red herring for the US (and really any part of the world). You know what's great and costs a fraction of this stuff? Normal trains. HSR is not very useful for local commutes cuz if it's going fast there aren't going to be many stops. So just build cheaper intercity networks that bring people where they need to go, and have _lots_ of stops. Successful HSR exists in places like France and Japan because of how urbanism was shaped in those places. Everything is in Paris, so people _have to go to Paris_. So the "every TGV line is to- or from- Paris" serves that purpose. Japan is one-dimensional, so you also only need one HSR line for effect (exageratting a bit). But HSR in both of those countries are extremely expensive, and despite people posting all the "Japan is cool" stuff with people taking the shinkansen every day for work, the reality is more banal (business trips, family vacations, same stuff as what you find with planes). But the big payoffs come from having people be able to rely on trains for more day-to-day stuff. And you solve the last mile problem by just building a train station every mile! And in that case your train really doesn't actually need to go that fast.
jmpman 5y ago
Why doesn’t some industrious individual purchase an entire town roughly 50miles from midtown Manhattan, owning say a 5 mile radius, and install a high speed rail (150MPH straight into Grand Central - no stops) 20min from Grand Central to the terminus, and then 10min from there to anywhere in the 5 mile radius. Now you can offer housing with a 30min commute to midtown. Only portions of Manhattan can offer that level of commuting convenience. Do the numbers not work out? Is this something that would only work in China, where the right of way, and land at the terminus could be acquired all at the same time without individual property owners trying to extract maximum value? Does a completely underground hyperloop resolve this land/right of way problem, reducing the entrepreneur to only having to acquire land at the terminus?
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Underground doesn't help you. Western property rights operate under the ad coeleum doctrine, or "whoever's is the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to Hell". The upper limit has been established by the US Supreme Court but there hasn't been a solid case about the lower limit, and testing this through litigation is a fairly difficult way to make money. A Hyperloop doesn't offer much advantage over conventional technology given the short distance (50 mi); even at normal high-speed-rail speeds you spend a good chunk of the time accelerating and decelerating. Speeding up and slowing down faster is not tenable, as no one wants to be on a roller coaster as a commute. The other thing is that the commuting range of New York is pretty far. The metro area is considered to stretch as far as Pike County PA (82 miles), Trenton NJ (70 miles), the entirety of Long Island, and New Haven (80 miles). Anything that is feasible to develop already has been; anything that hasn't been is either some land use that can't be developed (a park), has unfavorable geography (the Meadowlands is a marsh that gets flooded often and is vital to local flooding protection), or other mitigating factors. Then there's the issue of the land assembling. No one could afford to assemble such a parcel. NYC's metro area was estimated to have 10% of the entire country's real estate value [1]. And even if one had the land you can't just do whatever you like because you're the owner; you're still subject to local zoning rules. --- [1] https://www.6sqft.com/study-shows-huge-disparity-in-u-s-urban-land-value-with-nyc-making-up-10/ https://www.6sqft.com/study-shows-huge-disparity-in-u-s-urba...
starsep 5y ago
OpenRailwayMap[0] is useful to see where High-Speed Rail has been built - choose Max speeds map style. It uses data from OpenStreetMap[1] - free (as in freedom) map edited by community in a Wikipedia fashion. [0] https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/ https://www.openstreetmap.org/
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Highway self-driving is not the computational challenge that general insane-city / local street / surface street driving is. With mild convergent infrastructure (better marking policies for construction, mesh networking or broadcast messaging about road hazards and bottlenecks, etc) it will become pretty safe. And the trucking industry will push it quickly and probably within a fairly developed regulatory structure. And really that's all I want out of self-driving. Sleep or work in a car on a divided highway. That's really it. That one achievement will make short/medium trains, all intercity busses, and probably most airline flights under 400 miles not really that desirable. If my self-driving EV car gets me there even at 60 mph and I get to fill my car with crap, and I have the car when I get there, and I can load it with a family...

146 points by luu 5y ago

> Moreover, all lines [of the TGV] are very profitable excluding the cost of fixed capital. Why say this? It's a big capital-intensive project. A nuclear power plant is profitable if you exclude the cost of building the reactor, but that's the problem - you can't exclude it, and breakeven time is a big part of cost-benefit analysis. What was breakeven time for the TGV? That would convince me more.

timerol 5y ago
The next paragraph explains the return on capital for the various projects. This varies per-project and whether you include societal benefit or not. From a strictly financial return on capital perspective, the figures range from 15% to 4%, with the new Bordeaux-Toulouse likely to be under that.
swiley 5y ago
The US already has tons of rail, it's just only used for freight (often coal.) Maybe that's what they meant?
- moshmosh 5y ago
  I'd never made the connection between the gradual shuttering of coal plants and freight rail, but wow, that is a big deal. A quick search finds that coal is about 30% of rail tonnage in the US. A bunch more (not looking it up, but if you've ever seen a train, it's clearly also a lot of what they haul) is other fossil fuels. I wonder how they're going to cope with (let's give a very lowball estimate) 40% of their tonnage tapering off over the next few decades. Looks like coal shipped by rail is already way down from its peak, and dropping fast. Looks like they charge a premium for intermodal shipping—may have to cut prices on that to keep volume up.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Coal and other bulk materials are “easy” - one customer on each end. Intermodal is more complicated but at the right price it’ll be competitive with trucking.
flukus 5y ago
> Why say this? Because as long as their aren't ongoing operational costs it's enticing to governments to build, they don't care if it loses money overall because they aren't profit driven and have non-monetary goals.

hprotagonist 5y ago

As i understand things at a fairly high level, and particularly w/r/t the northeast corridor, high speed rail in the US has two interlinked technical facts about it that are hard to get over even if we can wave a magic policy wand and make governmental buy-in work several orders of magnitude better: - It's not that "American rail construction is just bad. However, this is not because rail is bad; it’s because the United States is bad.". It's that american rail construction in the northeast is OLD, and we're hosed by the first adopter paradox. - from this, it directly follows that upgrading the rail for high speed use is HARD, because the issue is at least in part down to rail line geometry. AIUI, a fundamental reason you can't go 95mph between Boston and New York is that the railroad tracks have curves in them whose radii have a maximum speed without risk of derailment that's quite low, and to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven. There are other issues too, like local/freight/... sharing the same lines, but that's kind of saying the same thing twice: construction through densely populated Northeast Corridor cities is so impractical that it's hard to see how it could ever happen or be thought of as a particularly good thing if it did.

cletus 5y ago
This is exactly right. It's not as simple as just upgrading tracks for high speed. There's only so far you can go around certain turns. There are also likely limits based on how separated the track is from the surroundings. Going 50mph has less of a risk profile than going 200mph. High speed rail is generally elevated and/or fenced off to avoid animals, peoples and objects that would otherwise be deadly. The UK has this problem with old rail too. European rail is quite new, probably thanks in part to the "benefit" of Europe being leveled in the last century. China and Japan have new rail too. Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated. Just look at how many airports there are in the US vs Europe. France, a country of 60M+, has a mere handful of airports. So it's easier to serve more people with less line. Lastly, construction is (now) super expensive in the US. Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being economically viable in the US.
- jschwartzi 5y ago
  Population clustering actually follows from the way people travel. It's a virtuous/vicious cycle where in the US we've been building in ways that reduce or eliminate the usefulness of high speed rail while countries that have favored rail have been doing the opposite. The US has always heavily-subsidized roads and automobile travel and as a consequence sprawl. I think it's catching up with us socially, economically, and physically. In my opinion focusing on cost versus fares is myopic to the point of insanity. As long as we're laser-focused on the economic viability of rail we'll never see any of the other benefits. We have a responsibility to future generations to not just keep things the same but to make them better, and I think rail does that. If you look around and you dislike your current mode of living, hate your commute, and want to have access to cities, then guess what rail is a solution for all of that. It takes decades to see any real benefit from it though, which is why nobody ever goes for it.

anewaccount2021 5y ago

HSR has become the infrastructure equivalent of an N95 mask - clung to as a culture war totem rather than something of immediate utility. Liberals want nation-spanning HSR but will never ride it; merely funding it is enough to retain the sense of victory over their red-state foes.

bsdetector 5y ago

Cars are too slow, airplanes too inconvenient, long-distance high-speed rail too expensive. Why not all three? Ground-effect airplanes should only take about 4x more energy than a car at the same speed, the track is just cement or even dirt, they're not useful for terrorism, no pilot needed, and they could even be powered electrically if they make stops every hour or two. You could drive onto a carrier and fly at 200 mph to your destination. Basically a slow hyperloop, but you don't need a vaccuum or anything high tech at all. I've asked about this before and nobody has explained why it wouldn't work - maybe it's so obvious it goes without saying. edit: hills could be made more flat but surely would be less problematic than for a train where the track must be almost totally flat, any small object or animal could be flown over maybe even trading speed for height, more energy intensive than high speed rail but construction and maintenance far less so. We can make a computer control system for F-117 but we can't control ground effect? These don't sound like carefully considered objections.

bluGill 5y ago
Wind resistance. Airplanes at altitude get a lot less wind resistance. Tracks also need a lot less right of way (width) vs ground effect airplanes which need wings. Rolling resistance is not a big deal for trains (or even cars). It exists, but it is small. The real issues for going faster for both is wind resistance. (maglev is better more for maintenance cost than rolling resistance - at least until we get to hyperloop speeds - if we ever do)
darksaints 5y ago
It can and has worked in the past, but only over water. Ground effect planes over land have the problem that land isn't really flat, and ground effect doesn't buffer as well as you might imagine. Even small mounds of dirt can cause an extremely uncomfortable ride. You can think of it like riding in a massive monster truck, but without shock absorbers. You're basically guaranteed to get sick.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Basically a slow hyperloop, but you don't need a vaccuum or anything high tech at all. I've asked about this before and nobody has explained why it wouldn't work Ground effect is unstable and hard to control, incursions on the track would be very dangerous, but most obvious measures to mitigate intrusions interfere with ground effect flight or require bigger rights of way. It would be a slow hyperloop with a much bigger ground footprint (like classical high speed rail), less efficiency than classical high-speed rail, control/safety issues not present in high-speed rail, etc.

darksaints 5y ago

One of the things that so many HSR enthusiasts seem to get wrong about HSR is expectations about non-stop trains between major cities. Successful systems either don't have them at all, or they are extremely limited. Certainly you can do non-stop trains, but the systems that do non-stop trains are all massive money losers. This idea is always met with extreme incredulousness about it because it violates their intuition. "You have to go as fast as possible or it won't compete well with air travel! If I have to stop in Merced for 5 minutes to let a handful of people on or off, I'd rather just fly". The problem is that those handfuls of people, the result of the potential travel between the cartesian product of dozens of cities, adds up. There are number of trade publications that have analyzed passenger patterns on successful systems and have found that the ridership exclusively between major terminal stations typically accounted for ~50% of total ridership, and less than 50% of total revenue. Smaller hops have higher prices and better market penetration because they aren't served by air travel and therefore have no competition. Larger hops between major cities have lower prices simply because they have to compete with air travel. Even in a "perfect" world with non-stop trains, HSR is still going to lose some traffic to air travel, and they won't have all of that massive supplementary revenue from intermediate destination travel. Unfortunately, the idea that we should build a system that isn't optimized for them just doesn't resonate with people. And since high speed rail is now a partisan issue, and those same parties have a sharp urban rural divide, we get two camps: 1) democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops, and 2) rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they would benefit from it greatly, because "socialism". And because of it, I believe American HSR is doomed. It will either get built and lose massive amounts of money, or it won't get built at all.

bombcar 5y ago
This is a major point - a high speed rail between Chicago and MSP would allow travel between those two points - but more importantly it would allow commuting travel from points in-between. If you build the rails well, you can run both express service (which skips stops to maintain higher speed) and local service (which stops at most or all stations). I believe the way to solve some of this would be to attack it from multiple directions: 1. Require that future highway construction be "rail-ready" - i.e., leave room and have curves that are friendly to adding rail to the highway corridor in the future. 2. Develop local rail corridors that are "high-speed-rail-ready" - as a connection between two large cities is mainly of interest to a few, but commuter rail to the nearest large city is more obviously valuable. And if designed right it can be made for commuting but still be curved, etc correctly to allow higher speed trains if/when it's finally connected through.

barathr 5y ago

There's a deeper issue, which is that such analyses always treat profitability as the key goal. This is public infrastructure -- it doesn't need to be profitable, just meet some more important public goal. We shouldn't expect that the electric grid be profitable in providing power to rural customers (and, similarly, mail delivery), and providing low-carbon, high-speed, easy-to-use transportation to everyone is an important societal goal.

admax88q 5y ago
Public services also have the benefit of being connected to the greater tax pool. If profitability is a goal of a public service, it shouldn't be measured in isolation. If the service causes an indirect increase economic activity it will cause a proportional increase in tax revenue.
loeg 5y ago
I think the author touches on this? France seems to include social value in its profitability calculations. (SNCF is the French state-owned railway company.)

Der_Einzige 5y ago

Back in 2012-2013, I did a type of competitive debate in american high school called "policy debate". That year, the topic (which we debate the full year about) involved transportation infrastructure. At the time, my partner and I read an affirmative about how good mass transit is. Randal O'Toole is the primary author of "mass transit is bad" style arguments used against us. It was so prolific that I had a counter piece of evidence titled "O'Toole is a tool" which just tried to character assissinate him. What is he doing still being relavent and stuff? I had judges on my debate circuit that apperently knew him in real life and mentioned at the time that he was old... Edit: for anyone that wants to know O'toole's canadian, extremely liberal equivilent who supports mass transit, I recommend you checkout the work of Todd Litman from the Victoria Transportation Institute. He wrote most of the evidence for "mass transit good" and has publicly feuded with O'toole multiple times.

barney54 5y ago
Did you ever try to respond to O'Toole's argument or was it all character assassination?
- lanternfish 5y ago
  In high school debate, including policy, strategy usually involves reading a bunch of different responses to make your opponent have to frontline (respond to responses) all of them in a tighter speech. Generally, high school debate is not a great forum for legitimist investigation of issues, and should be treated more like an advanced game with a lot of strong and unintuitive meta-strategies.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Libertarians know successful state run trains are they biggest ideological enemy. This is the hill they will die one.

djrogers 5y ago

There's a lot of hand-waving and unrealistic beliefs in this piece with regard to costs. For example: " O’Toole looks at the most expensive few lines possible: Britain’s 345‐ mile London–Scotland HS2 high‐ speed rail line was originally projected to cost £32.7 billion (about $123 million per mile) and is currently expected to cost £106 billion ($400 million per mile). International comparisons of high-speed rail costs exist, and Britain’s costs are by far the worst. " It looks as if California will exceed that cost by quite a bit for it's equivalent length HSR project, if and when it's ever completed. And how does this square with the current reality of the California project costs (estimated to be over $100M, even though it's over a decade for completion, and the budget has already grown >2.5x) " the official Obama-era crayon, at 20,000 km, would be $500 billion at tunnel-free European costs, or maybe $600 billion with 5% tunneling " So we're gonna do the rest of the 19,400 km for only $500bn, when the most recent 600km is costing $100bn?

hardtke 5y ago
A good friend of mine works for a large construction firm that has bid on some of the California high speed rail jobs. He said that for much of the work (particularly moving existing utility infrastructure) there are no firms bidding, or at most one firm. They therefore know they can jack up the price to 2-3X normal costs. The work needs to happen in places where there are literally no construction workers, and crews don't want to go to where the work needs to be done since there is other work close to their house.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Where I live, which has a large African-American population, construction workers that I see are overwhelmingly white and many of the unions are notoriously racist (and I don't know about the others). Just notice the people working those jobs around you. How much is that racism costing the US economically? Of course it costs the targets of racism the most: I don't have high-speed rail; they don't have jobs, health care, etc.
  - coredog64 5y ago

ncmncm 5y ago

American bullet trains are hamstrung by America's world leadership in legalized institutional corruption. Any big-ticket, long-term US capital project will be first and foremost a multi-year conduit from the public purse to private pockets, and might only incidentally deliver what was supposedly paid for, at 4x-20x the originally quoted price. The 3x-19x is corruption money. We see this, at various times, in transit tunnels (Big Dig, 2nd Ave Subway), nuke power plants, the embassy complex in Iraq, the Wall, F-35 and other military procurement, manned spaceflight, and California's bullet train fiasco (mercifully killed after shoveling out only the first few $billions of what promised to be a truly massive gravy train). Solar and wind power projects seem momentarily immune to this process, for reasons not exactly clear. Their short terms, clear goals, and simple accounting may leave little scope for massive corruption. Corruption wants projects that deliver a steady flow of cash for at least four years, preferably 10 or 20. There are rumblings about a new $trillion missile program, perhaps to take up the SLS contractors when SLS has to be cancelled in favor of SpaceX Starship at well below 1% of the price. The difference between SLS and Starship illustrates the difference between a program intended mainly to fuel corruption, and one with goals that match the label.

niftich 5y ago

Despite several flaws and uncharitable misrepresentations in his policy analysis, I actually agree with most of O'Toole's conclusions. I post a lot on here about rail, and I disagree with a lot of output from the Cato Institute, but the infrastructure cost of long-distance High Speed Rail in the US would be immense, and the geography of settlement and commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented to take advantage of passenger-only HSR. Americans already do most travel by car and long-distance travel by air, so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier substitute for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but drastically less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel. It's no accident France runs the TGV like an airline, because they work the same way: you get to your destination station, and now what? You need to hop on public transit or rent a car like you would at an airport. But in Europe, a big town is far more likely to have public transit of acceptable quality, frequency, and coverage to solve the last mile problem; all but the most transit-webbed US cities do not. This article exposes some of the flaws and misrepresentations in his analysis, but then contributes its own flaws in turn. One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as "moderate-speed trains" too. Truly High Speed Rail only runs in a dozen corridors in Europe, and the rest of the passenger rail on the continent runs the gamut from decent to atrocious. Buses are flexible, because they can go where the roads already go. One way to get around the last-mile problem is to ensure your destination is likely to be transit-webbed town, or your destination station is very close the location to which you actually want to go. This sounds a lot like commuter rail -- the speed depends on how much you want to spend on infrastructure. In the US, this would mean that lines radiate out from NYC, Boston, DC, Philly, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, SF, Miami, Seattle, Portland... but not any further than an hour or two of travel. The Northeast Corridor is a lucky exception because you have some of the most interconnected cities in the US all in a convenient line. What's most frustrating is that many of both the opponents and supporters of HSR in the US miss the point: the point is to both invest in and subsidize infrastructure and programs that are societally useful and unlock productivity and opportunities. The Cato Institute would prefer a world without subsidies, but that's not appropriate for the sorts of high-cost functions that offer a major benefit to society. Pedestrian Observations would prefer more mobility and transit, but sometimes that transit actually looks like an airplane or bus or subsidized taxis, because it's what makes most immediate use out of the current infrastructure in a way that balances opex with capex.

kingsuper20 5y ago

After reading the article, I can't help but feel that high speed rail is not: . An optimal solution to a problem or . A sexy solution looking for a problem but that it's an integral part of an entire society and lifestyle that some people want to embrace. Serious people-mover rail seems to be an organic part of some countries that are different in 100 (1000? 10,000?) different ways that people would like to emulate The arguments about serious modern rail investment look to be proxy arguments.

bluGill 5y ago
HSR was new in 1965. Most people reading this were not even born then. Congress wants to fund something new and exciting not the same old thing with just small upgrades. Of course the next congress will want to fund something different - so nothing will ever happen.
- dafty4 5y ago
  Yes and that next thing will be tax cuts, thanks to the libertarians. #yesWeCan?
  - bluGill 5y ago
    At least a tax cut lets me use my money in something useful for me. My taxes that have went to CAHSR have nothing useful to show for them. (I don't live in CA, so that is effectively zero, but the point stands) IF CAHSR would be completed it would develop economic growth. The consultants who have made money to date are not growth, they are a zero sum game where they could have been doing something else.

pwned1 5y ago

I really don't understand the argument for high speed rail in the US (outside of the NE corridor). There's nothing magical that's going to make it cheaper (see, e.g., California). The US is huge. High speed rail is absurdly expensive compared to planes, and capacity is nearly nothing compared to planes. So why is it such a focus of obsession? Because it looks cool seems to be the argument that is most prevalent. But the devil is in the details.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
The US may be huge. But regions within the US are not huge. There are at least a half-dozen regions in which high speed trains would make as much, if not more sense than they do in Europe if judged by population density and distances.
- etrabroline 5y ago
  Why build a train line that only takes you where a bus could, when you could build an airport that connects you to the entire globe?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Because you want to get somewhere faster than the bus or plane could deliver you. Because the environmental impact of trains is, while controversial, unquestionably less than that of flying. Because trains should be moving at an average of 140mph or so, which is more than twice that of a bus. Because most airports don't connect you to the entire globe in a single hop, so you may as well take the train to the existing one that does.
wahern 5y ago
It's chosen because airport and highway expansions also cost many billions, and at least on paper HSR often pencils out. California studies showed that alternatives centered on airport and/or highway expansions without HSR would have also cost tens of billions, and altogether ultimately more than a master plan including HSR. AFAIU the same analysis is true for the NE. CAHSR costs ballooned, but so do highway and airport expansions. The U.S. and many other countries have cost management problems with all large infrastructure projects.

leecarraher 5y ago

Instead of focusing on other countries successes with HSR it may be more applicable to look at our ongoing attempts at high speed rail. The California HSRA has been working toward the goal of HSR in california for over a decade. California has the largest tax revenue in the US and one of the most progressive populations. Despite this, they still are plagued by cost overruns, deadlines, and political opposition.

adamcstephens 5y ago
Part of the problem is the insistence and cost of using consultants. This LA Times article from 2019 explains it pretty well. https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-high-speed-rail-consultants-20190426-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-hi...

yongjik 5y ago

At the rate things are going, I wonder if it would be cheaper to just tunnel through most of urban/suburban areas. Seems preferable to building on top of ancient railroads, dealing with all those rich NIMBY assholes, and forever getting stuck with suboptimal path. South Korea built a whole 50km terminal section of HSR in a tunnel[1], starting at the outskirts of Seoul. It only took 3.0605 trillion KRW or about 2.7 billion dollars. SF to San Jose is only slightly farther (~50 mi or ~80 km). [1] https://www.tunneltalk.com/Korea-14Jul2015-Yulhyeon-Tunnel-final-breakthrough.php https://www.tunneltalk.com/Korea-14Jul2015-Yulhyeon-Tunnel-f...

bombcar 5y ago
Los Angles is doing tunneling for a subway and there’s tons of opposition and complaining.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  My favorite video on the subject: https://la.curbed.com/2014/9/26/10042166/bev-hills-paper-warns-about-isis-attack-on-unbuilt-la-subway https://la.curbed.com/2014/9/26/10042166/bev-hills-paper-war... Gas explosions and terrorists, oh my!

DominikPeters 5y ago

Lots of intercity bus advocates in the comments; I wonder if those people are frequent users. I’ve always regretted when I’ve chosen intercity buses. They are uncomfortable and cramped, get stuck in traffic, and you can’t properly do laptop work. I once took a flixbus from DC to NY to save $30 over Amtrak - what a terrible decision. (Riding Greyhound is an even more self-hating experience.) The price difference is telling: no one takes a bus when a train is available at the same price.

dougmwne 5y ago
I'm not quite as down on busses, but trains really are vastly more comfortable. After a bus ride I am physically tired because I need to engage my core to stay balanced through the bumps and turns. On a train you can actually rest.
- musicale 5y ago
  I want to like trains, but riding Amtrak a couple of years ago was disappointing. It was significantly more expensive than flying and took days rather than hours (though you don't have to show up 2 hours early for security thankfully.) The train itself was pretty run down compared to what I would have expected given the fare. On the up side, there is lot of space for luggage and stretching out, you can walk around the train, and there was an observation car and a café car (the food being more functional than palatable, but the scenery being rather nice.) So it's kind of like taking a break from reality and hanging out on a train for a few days while it slowly moves toward your destination. So it had its moments, but I'm in no hurry to do it again.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    How long did you travel? Trains sweet spot is a few dozen to a couple hundred miles. Anything longer really should be fulfilled with high-speed rail, or air.
  - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago
    Being in no hurry is a prerequisite for train travel.

toddmorey 5y ago

Randal O'Toole has been crashing rail conversations for years, always with wrong and misleading facts. It's not like he doesn't know when he's off (like his argument about the topography of Japan). He just bends the data however he can to support his anti-rail argument. Rail doesn't always make sense and rail projects can absolutely be poorly managed. But O'Toole adds nothing but noise to the conversation.

rtpg 5y ago

High-speed rail feels like such a red herring for the US (and really any part of the world). You know what's great and costs a fraction of this stuff? Normal trains. HSR is not very useful for local commutes cuz if it's going fast there aren't going to be many stops. So just build cheaper intercity networks that bring people where they need to go, and have _lots_ of stops. Successful HSR exists in places like France and Japan because of how urbanism was shaped in those places. Everything is in Paris, so people _have to go to Paris_. So the "every TGV line is to- or from- Paris" serves that purpose. Japan is one-dimensional, so you also only need one HSR line for effect (exageratting a bit). But HSR in both of those countries are extremely expensive, and despite people posting all the "Japan is cool" stuff with people taking the shinkansen every day for work, the reality is more banal (business trips, family vacations, same stuff as what you find with planes). But the big payoffs come from having people be able to rely on trains for more day-to-day stuff. And you solve the last mile problem by just building a train station every mile! And in that case your train really doesn't actually need to go that fast.

jmpman 5y ago

Why doesn’t some industrious individual purchase an entire town roughly 50miles from midtown Manhattan, owning say a 5 mile radius, and install a high speed rail (150MPH straight into Grand Central - no stops) 20min from Grand Central to the terminus, and then 10min from there to anywhere in the 5 mile radius. Now you can offer housing with a 30min commute to midtown. Only portions of Manhattan can offer that level of commuting convenience. Do the numbers not work out? Is this something that would only work in China, where the right of way, and land at the terminus could be acquired all at the same time without individual property owners trying to extract maximum value? Does a completely underground hyperloop resolve this land/right of way problem, reducing the entrepreneur to only having to acquire land at the terminus?

bobthepanda 5y ago
Underground doesn't help you. Western property rights operate under the ad coeleum doctrine, or "whoever's is the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to Hell". The upper limit has been established by the US Supreme Court but there hasn't been a solid case about the lower limit, and testing this through litigation is a fairly difficult way to make money. A Hyperloop doesn't offer much advantage over conventional technology given the short distance (50 mi); even at normal high-speed-rail speeds you spend a good chunk of the time accelerating and decelerating. Speeding up and slowing down faster is not tenable, as no one wants to be on a roller coaster as a commute. The other thing is that the commuting range of New York is pretty far. The metro area is considered to stretch as far as Pike County PA (82 miles), Trenton NJ (70 miles), the entirety of Long Island, and New Haven (80 miles). Anything that is feasible to develop already has been; anything that hasn't been is either some land use that can't be developed (a park), has unfavorable geography (the Meadowlands is a marsh that gets flooded often and is vital to local flooding protection), or other mitigating factors. Then there's the issue of the land assembling. No one could afford to assemble such a parcel. NYC's metro area was estimated to have 10% of the entire country's real estate value [1]. And even if one had the land you can't just do whatever you like because you're the owner; you're still subject to local zoning rules. --- [1] https://www.6sqft.com/study-shows-huge-disparity-in-u-s-urban-land-value-with-nyc-making-up-10/ https://www.6sqft.com/study-shows-huge-disparity-in-u-s-urba...

starsep 5y ago

OpenRailwayMap[0] is useful to see where High-Speed Rail has been built - choose Max speeds map style. It uses data from OpenStreetMap[1] - free (as in freedom) map edited by community in a Wikipedia fashion. [0] https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/ https://www.openstreetmap.org/

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Highway self-driving is not the computational challenge that general insane-city / local street / surface street driving is. With mild convergent infrastructure (better marking policies for construction, mesh networking or broadcast messaging about road hazards and bottlenecks, etc) it will become pretty safe. And the trucking industry will push it quickly and probably within a fairly developed regulatory structure. And really that's all I want out of self-driving. Sleep or work in a car on a divided highway. That's really it. That one achievement will make short/medium trains, all intercity busses, and probably most airline flights under 400 miles not really that desirable. If my self-driving EV car gets me there even at 60 mph and I get to fill my car with crap, and I have the car when I get there, and I can load it with a family...