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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 elim

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?
        bluGill 5y ago
        Because a big advantage to trains over airplanes is you can stop at places in between for low cost. It is common for airplanes to spend more time getting from the gate to cruising altitude and back down than at cruise. A train going Chicago to Minneapolis would only lose a few minutes stopping at cities like Milwaukee WI and Madison WI - both fairly large cities. An airplane could stop at each, but the cost of one stop would double the full trip time. Where a train stops vs go past is a very complex subject full of trade offs. However in general a train that only goes non-stop between two points is a bad idea. I've been in discussions elsewhere in this topic about that - read them for more info. (including those who disagree - they have valuable insight)
- zdragnar 5y ago
  We have plenty of proof to the opposite near where I live. Passenger rail was installed in several locations with the promise of growth that never materialized. One of the lines is from downtown to an airport, through a few miles of neglected neighborhoods that never got the rush of development and gentrification rail was supposed to bring. Another goes from the city through several suburbs and has had negligible impact because ridership is so low. People prefer not being constrained to the train tracks if they can drive, they prefer to not live near the constant blaring of horns and squealing of wheels on the tracks, and in these days prefer not to be stuck in a cabin full of potentially sick strangers for 2-3 hours a day round trip.
  - pchristensen 5y ago
    "the promise of growth that never materialized." Was it legal and politically palatable to build there, or in the neglected neighborhoods around it? In the USA, unless you're talking about actual greenfield land, rail-supporting development is usually illegal to build.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      Rail was sold by the city as a way to promote growth there- aside from hooking up the airport, it was the only reason to run rail at all.
      - jschwartzi 5y ago
        The central question is how was the land abutting each station zoned? Did they change the zoning to allow for more development? Or did it remain mostly residential-zoned and just change from single-family to multi-family? The reason rail works beautifully in other countries is that you can get off the train and walk to useful destinations, even if where you disembarked isn't where you live. Shinkansen in Japan have tons of shopping, nice restaurants, and hotels all within a block or two of the station. So there's a reason for non-residents to stop as well as residents. And because everything surrounds the station there's no point for residents to go anywhere else.
  - 5y ago
- photojosh 5y ago
  It's like people have completely forgotten that rail allowed the USA to open up and develop in the interior in the first place! Look at the amazing featured map in [0]! (I live in the town that had the first rail line in Australia.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad
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.

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?
      - bluGill 5y ago
        Because a big advantage to trains over airplanes is you can stop at places in between for low cost. It is common for airplanes to spend more time getting from the gate to cruising altitude and back down than at cruise. A train going Chicago to Minneapolis would only lose a few minutes stopping at cities like Milwaukee WI and Madison WI - both fairly large cities. An airplane could stop at each, but the cost of one stop would double the full trip time. Where a train stops vs go past is a very complex subject full of trade offs. However in general a train that only goes non-stop between two points is a bad idea. I've been in discussions elsewhere in this topic about that - read them for more info. (including those who disagree - they have valuable insight)
zdragnar 5y ago
We have plenty of proof to the opposite near where I live. Passenger rail was installed in several locations with the promise of growth that never materialized. One of the lines is from downtown to an airport, through a few miles of neglected neighborhoods that never got the rush of development and gentrification rail was supposed to bring. Another goes from the city through several suburbs and has had negligible impact because ridership is so low. People prefer not being constrained to the train tracks if they can drive, they prefer to not live near the constant blaring of horns and squealing of wheels on the tracks, and in these days prefer not to be stuck in a cabin full of potentially sick strangers for 2-3 hours a day round trip.
- pchristensen 5y ago
  "the promise of growth that never materialized." Was it legal and politically palatable to build there, or in the neglected neighborhoods around it? In the USA, unless you're talking about actual greenfield land, rail-supporting development is usually illegal to build.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    Rail was sold by the city as a way to promote growth there- aside from hooking up the airport, it was the only reason to run rail at all.
    - jschwartzi 5y ago
      The central question is how was the land abutting each station zoned? Did they change the zoning to allow for more development? Or did it remain mostly residential-zoned and just change from single-family to multi-family? The reason rail works beautifully in other countries is that you can get off the train and walk to useful destinations, even if where you disembarked isn't where you live. Shinkansen in Japan have tons of shopping, nice restaurants, and hotels all within a block or two of the station. So there's a reason for non-residents to stop as well as residents. And because everything surrounds the station there's no point for residents to go anywhere else.
- 5y ago
photojosh 5y ago
It's like people have completely forgotten that rail allowed the USA to open up and develop in the interior in the first place! Look at the amazing featured map in [0]! (I live in the town that had the first rail line in Australia.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad

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.