8 ms·

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 li

by 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.
- bombcar 5y ago
  This is the main (and perhaps the most important driving factor) - if you build a rail line from empty land directly into the heart of a major US city, that empty land will develop relatively quickly over the next 10-20 years. Instead we've done the same but with sprawling highways, which doesn't do much for density (and requires cars, and once you have a car you just use it for commuting).
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Careful there. It is easy to do stupid things and so not get that growth. A HSR from middle of nowhere south Dakota to NYC grand central station will get approximately 0 riders - the distance (all distance in transport is measured in minutes not meters) is too far to commute every day, and there is nothing else to draw people. I wish this didn't need to be pointed out, but there are a lot of stupid proposals out there. So be on the lookout - don't blinding support HSR: put support where it will be useful.
    - jschwartzi 5y ago
      Nope, you're totally right. The devil here is entirely in the details.
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      Alternatively though if you built an express line from Tupper Lake to Grand Central, Tupper Lake would become the new Greenwich.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      There's a common fallacy here: that a line built from "nowhere, SD" to NYC serves only people from either NYC or "nowhere, SD". But that's never true. It would serve people all along the route, people taking shorter, "more regional" journeys. The fact that nobody actually rides the whole line doesn't matter. Of course, that still may not be enough to justify such a line, but the fact that nobody travels from one end to the other is not an issue.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        I did forget to put in the non-stop qualifier. Which is another stupid thing people propose all the time.
        PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        Why is it stupid?
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  I'm not going to disagree with the arguments you are making as they are valid in their own right, but I will point some to some important tradeoffs your post skips over. First, there is a fundamental tradeoff between location and transportation. Land is not a produced good, it is owned by landlords and its value comes from location. Transportation makes prime land less valuable and outlying land more valuable, thus it redistributes value outward, allowing people to escape from the thumbs of landlords and buy their own land. Eisenhower's freeway building project and cheap gas is responsible for the American middle class, much moreso than anything FDR did, as people could move out of apartment buildings in inner cities and buy land of their own, due to the improvements in transportation technology. For those improvements to work, you have to fan out. A rail line isn't going to get it done, but what a rail line can do is transport people to a remote place and then they fan out with roads. That is a good idea for redistributing people if an area is already densely populated and the land is bought in a large circle around the city. Then you hop on a train to take you to nowhere and there you can buy cheap land. But if the built up area is relatively small, you are better off with a network of cheap roads to carry you to where land is cheaper. Thus the U.S., which has always had smaller cities surrounded by more open space than Europe, got more bang from its buck with roads. But the same network of roads did not have the transformative effect in Europe as it did in the U.S. What is interesting is the shift to remote work. The internet has made communication another strong rival to location, providing another threat to land values in inner cities. So it could be that in the future, we will not need so many subsidies for transportation but for things like broadband, to help nurture the middle class and allow people to buy land in remote areas. People - especially landlords -- are very much aware of these dynamics, which is why historically there was great opposition to roads from moneyed interests, as documented by Adam Smith. And why roads are deserving of subsidies, due to all the positive externalities. In the same way, internet infrastructure is deserving of subsidies today. Whether or not rail is deserving of subsidies in the US depends on how large the disk is of expensive land surrounding cities. In the northeast, it is large, and that's why you see rail in the northeast. In most of the U.S., it's not large at all and you can buy affordable land without traveling too far away from work. In Europe, it tends to be large as well. With the internet, that is only getting better and both road and rail are becoming less relevant as an agent for the promotion of the middle class land ownership. They are still relevant, but I believe the window has closed on dreams of high speed rail connecting cities in the U.S. High speed internet will get the job done faster and easier, if coupled from a large shift to working from home.
bluGill 5y ago
Population density on the US east coast or even midwest isn't that far off from Europe.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Not only is it "not far off" it's locally higher. Ohio is more densely populated than Spain. They even both have a city called Toledo. The difference is the smaller city in Spain has a high-speed rail link to the capital with 6 trains per day, while the larger city in Ohio has only two conventional trains per day, neither of which serve the nearest city, Detroit, only 60 miles away. In any sensible universe, the major cities of Ohio would be connected to each other, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh by high-speed rail.
jcranmer 5y ago
> Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated. This is commonly trotted out, and it is false for all practical purposes. The US does have a lot of empty spaces where no one lives--but no one is seriously proposing to hook up empty spaces to HSR. If you instead look at where people in the US do live, it's not all that different from those places. If you mapped out the major cities of the Midwest centered on Chicago and compared it to France, you'll find that the US has larger cities whose distances from the major regional hub are roughly the same as their corresponding cities in France. Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it should generally work equally well in the US to connect those cities.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  >but no one is seriously proposing to hook up empty spaces to HSR. The California HSR plan begs to differ. >Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it should generally work equally well in the US to connect those cities. Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather than further away cities.
  - khuey 5y ago
    The proposed San Francisco/Los Angeles HSR line is fairly comparable to the Madrid/Barcelona HSR line.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    I'll point out that Fresno, CA has roughly the same population as Nantes and Nice, France, both of which have dedicated TGV lines specifically to reach those cities. Do you still think that qualifies as "empty spaces"?
    - vinay427 5y ago
      Fresno (1700/sq. km) also has less than half the population density of Nantes or Nice (4200-4800/sq. km). It's not exactly a fair comparison if the area of the city is far larger unless the last-kilometer transit seamlessly scales to last-2km transit. You can actually walk to a reasonable number of places, or take a bus 1-2 km to many more, from a main station in Nantes, Nice, or any number of similarly-sized cities in many countries.
TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
If we wait until areas have high population density, it's harder and more expensive to build through it, and people don't want to fund the project. If we don't wait and want to build now, people don't want to fund the project due to lack of immediate ridership. Funny how we keep building roads, and expanding highways, while saying building rail infrastructure doesn't make sense because there aren't enough people to use it.
Analemma_ 5y ago
Why is there this asymmetrical demand that only high-speed rail needs to be “economically viable“? Roads don’t get this demand: tolls and gas taxes don’t even come close to paying for their upkeep, and nobody cares because a transportation network is a public good where accurately billing for upkeep is worth a lot less than the societal benefits.
rjsw 5y ago
France had plenty of airports, they just got less use once the TGV network expanded.
bradleyjg 5y ago
> Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being economically viable in the US. It’s not that sad. We have lots and lots of other low hanging fruit to pick. Let’s even further improve fright distribution by rail. Let’s get mass transit within our cities and their suburbs to be less terrible. Let’s have more than a handful of cities in the entire country where people can reasonably live without cars.
- bluGill 5y ago
  The US does pretty good about freight by rail, and I think they should be left to improve themselves for now. There are a lot of things they should do better, but they are doing okay. Most cities have terrible mass transit. Good transit is one where people don't have to arrange their life around it. Meaning it comes often, and is reasonably fast.
namdnay 5y ago
I’m not sure where you’re getting your facts from, but France has 3 major airports (Orly,Roissy,Nice), several other large international ones (Geneva, Mulhouse) and many more smaller ones
bobthepanda 5y ago
The true high speed lines (TGV, Eurostar, ICE) start showing up in the '80s, when WWII reconstruction has been over for several decades. They upgraded their old regional lines too but that's not really relevant to the experience of new, 300+ km/h rail.
- cletus 5y ago
  The Northeast corridor in the US was opened in 1834. My point was that the rail infrastructure in Europe just isn't that old and even in the 1980s you had a huge advantage in building for speed over the 1830s.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    The state of the 1834 track has very little bearing on building new track in 2020, which is how every other country on the planet has built high speed rail.
  - willyt 5y ago
    I don't think that is true. Small bits of the Northeast corridor were opened in 1834 but the whole thing wasn't complete until 1880 or something like that. I think a lot of Europe's infrastructure is as old or older. Especially in the UK where trains were invented and first commercially operated at scale. If you compare to a route of similar length in the UK, on average the ~400miles of line between London and Edinburgh/Glasgow is probably about 20-30 years older. Trains were racing to Scotland from London up the West and East coasts from the 1860's onwards and there was a lot of competition between the two routes to be the fastest. The time over the 400 mile route was down to about 8hrs by 1880 and about 7hrs in the 1930's. These days trains operate on the two main routes at up to 140mph now and it's possible to get a train that does it in about 4h30m with a few intermediate stops. This is not so hot compared to TGV Paris-Bordeaux at 2h10 on a dedicated HSR route but it does compare favourably to Acela's 6h30 over a similar distance also on a legacy route. This is because the alignment has been worked on continuously over the years to improve speed, it's not the same alignment as it was in the 1850's when it was first completed and both East and West routes pass through quite a few cities and towns on the way.
willyt 5y ago
The UK has quite high speeds (125-140mph) on its conventional rail lines all on lines that were first built between 1850-1900 but have been gradually realigned to be faster. Most war damage was to the junctions not the route alignment out in open country so there were improvements in throughput at junctions made by rationalisation of the layout but routes between cities weren’t realigned because of war damage.

by cletus 5y ago

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.

bombcar 5y ago
This is the main (and perhaps the most important driving factor) - if you build a rail line from empty land directly into the heart of a major US city, that empty land will develop relatively quickly over the next 10-20 years. Instead we've done the same but with sprawling highways, which doesn't do much for density (and requires cars, and once you have a car you just use it for commuting).
- bluGill 5y ago
  Careful there. It is easy to do stupid things and so not get that growth. A HSR from middle of nowhere south Dakota to NYC grand central station will get approximately 0 riders - the distance (all distance in transport is measured in minutes not meters) is too far to commute every day, and there is nothing else to draw people. I wish this didn't need to be pointed out, but there are a lot of stupid proposals out there. So be on the lookout - don't blinding support HSR: put support where it will be useful.
  - jschwartzi 5y ago
    Nope, you're totally right. The devil here is entirely in the details.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Alternatively though if you built an express line from Tupper Lake to Grand Central, Tupper Lake would become the new Greenwich.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    There's a common fallacy here: that a line built from "nowhere, SD" to NYC serves only people from either NYC or "nowhere, SD". But that's never true. It would serve people all along the route, people taking shorter, "more regional" journeys. The fact that nobody actually rides the whole line doesn't matter. Of course, that still may not be enough to justify such a line, but the fact that nobody travels from one end to the other is not an issue.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      I did forget to put in the non-stop qualifier. Which is another stupid thing people propose all the time.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        Why is it stupid?
rsj_hn 5y ago
I'm not going to disagree with the arguments you are making as they are valid in their own right, but I will point some to some important tradeoffs your post skips over. First, there is a fundamental tradeoff between location and transportation. Land is not a produced good, it is owned by landlords and its value comes from location. Transportation makes prime land less valuable and outlying land more valuable, thus it redistributes value outward, allowing people to escape from the thumbs of landlords and buy their own land. Eisenhower's freeway building project and cheap gas is responsible for the American middle class, much moreso than anything FDR did, as people could move out of apartment buildings in inner cities and buy land of their own, due to the improvements in transportation technology. For those improvements to work, you have to fan out. A rail line isn't going to get it done, but what a rail line can do is transport people to a remote place and then they fan out with roads. That is a good idea for redistributing people if an area is already densely populated and the land is bought in a large circle around the city. Then you hop on a train to take you to nowhere and there you can buy cheap land. But if the built up area is relatively small, you are better off with a network of cheap roads to carry you to where land is cheaper. Thus the U.S., which has always had smaller cities surrounded by more open space than Europe, got more bang from its buck with roads. But the same network of roads did not have the transformative effect in Europe as it did in the U.S. What is interesting is the shift to remote work. The internet has made communication another strong rival to location, providing another threat to land values in inner cities. So it could be that in the future, we will not need so many subsidies for transportation but for things like broadband, to help nurture the middle class and allow people to buy land in remote areas. People - especially landlords -- are very much aware of these dynamics, which is why historically there was great opposition to roads from moneyed interests, as documented by Adam Smith. And why roads are deserving of subsidies, due to all the positive externalities. In the same way, internet infrastructure is deserving of subsidies today. Whether or not rail is deserving of subsidies in the US depends on how large the disk is of expensive land surrounding cities. In the northeast, it is large, and that's why you see rail in the northeast. In most of the U.S., it's not large at all and you can buy affordable land without traveling too far away from work. In Europe, it tends to be large as well. With the internet, that is only getting better and both road and rail are becoming less relevant as an agent for the promotion of the middle class land ownership. They are still relevant, but I believe the window has closed on dreams of high speed rail connecting cities in the U.S. High speed internet will get the job done faster and easier, if coupled from a large shift to working from home.

bluGill 5y ago

Population density on the US east coast or even midwest isn't that far off from Europe.

jeffbee 5y ago
Not only is it "not far off" it's locally higher. Ohio is more densely populated than Spain. They even both have a city called Toledo. The difference is the smaller city in Spain has a high-speed rail link to the capital with 6 trains per day, while the larger city in Ohio has only two conventional trains per day, neither of which serve the nearest city, Detroit, only 60 miles away. In any sensible universe, the major cities of Ohio would be connected to each other, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh by high-speed rail.

jcranmer 5y ago

> Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated. This is commonly trotted out, and it is false for all practical purposes. The US does have a lot of empty spaces where no one lives--but no one is seriously proposing to hook up empty spaces to HSR. If you instead look at where people in the US do live, it's not all that different from those places. If you mapped out the major cities of the Midwest centered on Chicago and compared it to France, you'll find that the US has larger cities whose distances from the major regional hub are roughly the same as their corresponding cities in France. Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it should generally work equally well in the US to connect those cities.

marcinzm 5y ago
>but no one is seriously proposing to hook up empty spaces to HSR. The California HSR plan begs to differ. >Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it should generally work equally well in the US to connect those cities. Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather than further away cities.
- khuey 5y ago
  The proposed San Francisco/Los Angeles HSR line is fairly comparable to the Madrid/Barcelona HSR line.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  I'll point out that Fresno, CA has roughly the same population as Nantes and Nice, France, both of which have dedicated TGV lines specifically to reach those cities. Do you still think that qualifies as "empty spaces"?
  - vinay427 5y ago
    Fresno (1700/sq. km) also has less than half the population density of Nantes or Nice (4200-4800/sq. km). It's not exactly a fair comparison if the area of the city is far larger unless the last-kilometer transit seamlessly scales to last-2km transit. You can actually walk to a reasonable number of places, or take a bus 1-2 km to many more, from a main station in Nantes, Nice, or any number of similarly-sized cities in many countries.

TYPE_FASTER 5y ago

If we wait until areas have high population density, it's harder and more expensive to build through it, and people don't want to fund the project. If we don't wait and want to build now, people don't want to fund the project due to lack of immediate ridership. Funny how we keep building roads, and expanding highways, while saying building rail infrastructure doesn't make sense because there aren't enough people to use it.

Analemma_ 5y ago

Why is there this asymmetrical demand that only high-speed rail needs to be “economically viable“? Roads don’t get this demand: tolls and gas taxes don’t even come close to paying for their upkeep, and nobody cares because a transportation network is a public good where accurately billing for upkeep is worth a lot less than the societal benefits.

rjsw 5y ago

France had plenty of airports, they just got less use once the TGV network expanded.

bradleyjg 5y ago

> Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being economically viable in the US. It’s not that sad. We have lots and lots of other low hanging fruit to pick. Let’s even further improve fright distribution by rail. Let’s get mass transit within our cities and their suburbs to be less terrible. Let’s have more than a handful of cities in the entire country where people can reasonably live without cars.

bluGill 5y ago
The US does pretty good about freight by rail, and I think they should be left to improve themselves for now. There are a lot of things they should do better, but they are doing okay. Most cities have terrible mass transit. Good transit is one where people don't have to arrange their life around it. Meaning it comes often, and is reasonably fast.

namdnay 5y ago

I’m not sure where you’re getting your facts from, but France has 3 major airports (Orly,Roissy,Nice), several other large international ones (Geneva, Mulhouse) and many more smaller ones

bobthepanda 5y ago

The true high speed lines (TGV, Eurostar, ICE) start showing up in the '80s, when WWII reconstruction has been over for several decades. They upgraded their old regional lines too but that's not really relevant to the experience of new, 300+ km/h rail.

cletus 5y ago
The Northeast corridor in the US was opened in 1834. My point was that the rail infrastructure in Europe just isn't that old and even in the 1980s you had a huge advantage in building for speed over the 1830s.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  The state of the 1834 track has very little bearing on building new track in 2020, which is how every other country on the planet has built high speed rail.
- willyt 5y ago
  I don't think that is true. Small bits of the Northeast corridor were opened in 1834 but the whole thing wasn't complete until 1880 or something like that. I think a lot of Europe's infrastructure is as old or older. Especially in the UK where trains were invented and first commercially operated at scale. If you compare to a route of similar length in the UK, on average the ~400miles of line between London and Edinburgh/Glasgow is probably about 20-30 years older. Trains were racing to Scotland from London up the West and East coasts from the 1860's onwards and there was a lot of competition between the two routes to be the fastest. The time over the 400 mile route was down to about 8hrs by 1880 and about 7hrs in the 1930's. These days trains operate on the two main routes at up to 140mph now and it's possible to get a train that does it in about 4h30m with a few intermediate stops. This is not so hot compared to TGV Paris-Bordeaux at 2h10 on a dedicated HSR route but it does compare favourably to Acela's 6h30 over a similar distance also on a legacy route. This is because the alignment has been worked on continuously over the years to improve speed, it's not the same alignment as it was in the 1850's when it was first completed and both East and West routes pass through quite a few cities and towns on the way.

willyt 5y ago

The UK has quite high speeds (125-140mph) on its conventional rail lines all on lines that were first built between 1850-1900 but have been gradually realigned to be faster. Most war damage was to the junctions not the route alignment out in open country so there were improvements in throughput at junctions made by rationalisation of the layout but routes between cities weren’t realigned because of war damage.