4 ms·

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

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.
kingsuper20 5y ago
> rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they would benefit from it greatly, It's not clear to me how a rural voter (I guess the 'voter' part is because these are publicly funded works) really benefits. Once a year vacations to the beach? Shopping trips where you are limited to what you can manage on foot? Visits to a specialist doctor? Since the sense of rail depends on regular use, I guess all that's left is commutes from a dispersed area to a central one. You have to wonder how much telecommuting will decrease the need for that over time. One good thing about rail is that you are allowed to do it piecemeal. There's bound to be somewhere that needs a point A to point B bullet train.
- bombcar 5y ago
  A practical step that would not be excessively costly would be to standardize the three types of rail in the US - local tram, commuter, and intercity/high speed (fun fact - depending on your definition of high speed rail current Amtrak trains can hit that, as on correct track and with positive train control they can do 125+ MPH). If it's standardized it will be easier to make sure you can develop it piecemeal.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Amtrak is higher speed rail. HSR needs to average 140mph - including stops at any station between where you want to go.
    - darksaints 5y ago
      Nobody would consider Tokaido Shinkansen to not be HSR, but it averages ~125mph.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        They should. Back in the day it was built that was high speed, but technology has marched on and it shouldn't be called high speed anymore.
bluGill 5y ago
You are not wrong, but that is misleading. HSR needs to be limited stop - they need 10 km just to get up to speed. Most of the energy is used getting up to speed (regenerative braking helps but doesn't get it all back), so for short trips you HSR is too expensive and not much faster. That said, the advantage of rail is it stops at points in between. It cannot stop at every little town, but it needs to stop at every big city (you might even be able to do a suburb to downtown - the idea looks like it would work on paper but I'm not aware of real experience), and it the big cities are far enough in-between some small city should get a station. This is very complex though. There is a trade off between stopping time and number of people on the train. You can stop in each city for as little as 1 minute (plus a few more to decelerate/accelerate) if your train has a lot of doors making it fast/easy to get on/off, but those doors mean there are less seats so less people are on the train. Or you can have just one door, but now there is a long line at that door and you need to stop for 15 minutes at each small town. So busy lines will have less stops than not so busy lines - the latter need more stops to attract all the customers they can get. This trade off needs to be considered separately for each line.
- bombcar 5y ago
  The usual solution to this is having local vs express service - lines run alongside each other where there is a bumpkin train that stops every few miles, but every 50 or so it stops at a station that is also serviced by an express or even a high-speed stop.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    This is how it is supposed to work. If you are going someplace distant you can take the high speed train most of the way and then transfer to the slow regional for the last leg of the journey. Unfortunately this system means you need parallel tracks, one set for the high speed express trains and another for the regionals. This isn't as bad as it seems, it requires double the steel and concrete, but the land is the expensive part of the deal and even though the parcel you need is wider the expense is not doubled. Or you can run the high speed rail on routes that are optimal for it and leave the regional rail in its byzantine routes from the 30s that serve the locals well.
bluGill 5y ago
(separate post for politics) > democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops A few do. Based on the people they elect most don't actually care about high speed rail. They care about workers - the more the better, and even better yet if you can make those workers minorities. High speed rail is only a proxy for spending lots of money on something that gets people working, if the rail is never finished that is so much the better because they can keep paying those people to build the line. Rural voters won't benefit much. By the time they drive to a big city where they can catch the train they may as well fly. The amount of distance needed to get to the train station means that there isn't very much in range by rail that they are not better off driving. Note, there is rural voters and hobby farm voters. The hobby farm voters live and work in a big city, and go home to their small farm with a little bit of livestock to farm for fun. They might make money on the farm, but it isn't their day job. The only difference from suburban voters is they are just a little bit farther out. There are a lot of these voters who don't see how HSR will help them, even though it will once they realize how much faster it is to get to other cities.
- bombcar 5y ago
  So write the bill to require Halliburton to build the rail and hire minorities to do so. Everyone gets to skim and everyone is happy and eventually you might even get something that kind of works. /sarcastic, but not entirely
- fl0wenol 5y ago
  You're not ... wrong, but I can't shake your use of the term "hobby farm voters" which is the worst kind of no-true-Scotsman aspersion, it really brings the rest of your argument down. And what is the problem with putting minorities to work on the face, that it's a kind of virtue-signaling? It seems like that there's no inherit value in these things by your argument. And yet, yes, there is an issue with large infrastructure projects being turned into jobs programs so the scope creeps and they never get done-- A problem not unique to transportation infrastructure, but government-funded projects in general, as the incentives for project managers in govt and politicians are aligned to continuously increase scope
johnwalkr 5y ago
You can have both though. In Europe and Asia you can usually choose a train with few stops or many on the same line, and you’ll see the fast train blow by the slow one as it’s stopped at a minor station.

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.

kingsuper20 5y ago

> rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they would benefit from it greatly, It's not clear to me how a rural voter (I guess the 'voter' part is because these are publicly funded works) really benefits. Once a year vacations to the beach? Shopping trips where you are limited to what you can manage on foot? Visits to a specialist doctor? Since the sense of rail depends on regular use, I guess all that's left is commutes from a dispersed area to a central one. You have to wonder how much telecommuting will decrease the need for that over time. One good thing about rail is that you are allowed to do it piecemeal. There's bound to be somewhere that needs a point A to point B bullet train.

bombcar 5y ago
A practical step that would not be excessively costly would be to standardize the three types of rail in the US - local tram, commuter, and intercity/high speed (fun fact - depending on your definition of high speed rail current Amtrak trains can hit that, as on correct track and with positive train control they can do 125+ MPH). If it's standardized it will be easier to make sure you can develop it piecemeal.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Amtrak is higher speed rail. HSR needs to average 140mph - including stops at any station between where you want to go.
  - darksaints 5y ago
    Nobody would consider Tokaido Shinkansen to not be HSR, but it averages ~125mph.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      They should. Back in the day it was built that was high speed, but technology has marched on and it shouldn't be called high speed anymore.

bluGill 5y ago

You are not wrong, but that is misleading. HSR needs to be limited stop - they need 10 km just to get up to speed. Most of the energy is used getting up to speed (regenerative braking helps but doesn't get it all back), so for short trips you HSR is too expensive and not much faster. That said, the advantage of rail is it stops at points in between. It cannot stop at every little town, but it needs to stop at every big city (you might even be able to do a suburb to downtown - the idea looks like it would work on paper but I'm not aware of real experience), and it the big cities are far enough in-between some small city should get a station. This is very complex though. There is a trade off between stopping time and number of people on the train. You can stop in each city for as little as 1 minute (plus a few more to decelerate/accelerate) if your train has a lot of doors making it fast/easy to get on/off, but those doors mean there are less seats so less people are on the train. Or you can have just one door, but now there is a long line at that door and you need to stop for 15 minutes at each small town. So busy lines will have less stops than not so busy lines - the latter need more stops to attract all the customers they can get. This trade off needs to be considered separately for each line.

bombcar 5y ago
The usual solution to this is having local vs express service - lines run alongside each other where there is a bumpkin train that stops every few miles, but every 50 or so it stops at a station that is also serviced by an express or even a high-speed stop.
- jandrese 5y ago
  This is how it is supposed to work. If you are going someplace distant you can take the high speed train most of the way and then transfer to the slow regional for the last leg of the journey. Unfortunately this system means you need parallel tracks, one set for the high speed express trains and another for the regionals. This isn't as bad as it seems, it requires double the steel and concrete, but the land is the expensive part of the deal and even though the parcel you need is wider the expense is not doubled. Or you can run the high speed rail on routes that are optimal for it and leave the regional rail in its byzantine routes from the 30s that serve the locals well.

bluGill 5y ago

(separate post for politics) > democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops A few do. Based on the people they elect most don't actually care about high speed rail. They care about workers - the more the better, and even better yet if you can make those workers minorities. High speed rail is only a proxy for spending lots of money on something that gets people working, if the rail is never finished that is so much the better because they can keep paying those people to build the line. Rural voters won't benefit much. By the time they drive to a big city where they can catch the train they may as well fly. The amount of distance needed to get to the train station means that there isn't very much in range by rail that they are not better off driving. Note, there is rural voters and hobby farm voters. The hobby farm voters live and work in a big city, and go home to their small farm with a little bit of livestock to farm for fun. They might make money on the farm, but it isn't their day job. The only difference from suburban voters is they are just a little bit farther out. There are a lot of these voters who don't see how HSR will help them, even though it will once they realize how much faster it is to get to other cities.

bombcar 5y ago
So write the bill to require Halliburton to build the rail and hire minorities to do so. Everyone gets to skim and everyone is happy and eventually you might even get something that kind of works. /sarcastic, but not entirely
fl0wenol 5y ago
You're not ... wrong, but I can't shake your use of the term "hobby farm voters" which is the worst kind of no-true-Scotsman aspersion, it really brings the rest of your argument down. And what is the problem with putting minorities to work on the face, that it's a kind of virtue-signaling? It seems like that there's no inherit value in these things by your argument. And yet, yes, there is an issue with large infrastructure projects being turned into jobs programs so the scope creeps and they never get done-- A problem not unique to transportation infrastructure, but government-funded projects in general, as the incentives for project managers in govt and politicians are aligned to continuously increase scope

johnwalkr 5y ago

You can have both though. In Europe and Asia you can usually choose a train with few stops or many on the same line, and you’ll see the fast train blow by the slow one as it’s stopped at a minor station.