8 ms·

What I find odd about this is that... Trains are the go-to means of intercity transport across much of Europe. The term "High speed rail" isn't strictly define

What I find odd about this is that... Trains are the go-to means of intercity transport across much of Europe. The term "High speed rail" isn't strictly defined, but seems to kick in somewhere between 110 and 155 mph. Pretty much every intercity train in the UK is running at 125mph for at least some of their journey. Europe is full of functioning high speed rail networks - TGV, ICE, Eurostar, networks in Spain and Italy. If you include 125 mph networks then there's loads of them - and those older, slower high speed networks have more or less been profitable. Even the US has a high speed rail corridor in the North East. The author tries to make the argument that there's physical limits to high speed rail that mean it'll never catch on. But the limits are far more political than physical. If you live in the UK or Europe, rail is the go to method of travel between cities. Edit to add: the distance between LA and San Francisco is 382 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as between either London and Edinburgh and London and Glasgow. There's something like 22 trains a day on each route - more or less every half hour during the day. The time from city centre to city centre is better by train than plane or driving. That's not even a proper "high speed" train - the routes they follow were laid out in the 1800s.

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dasloop 4y ago
In many HN publications the label "In USA" is applicable, the equivalent of "In mice" for many medical studies :)
- 1123581321 4y ago
  Read the article—the author prefaces with their experience riding trains all over the world and has worked in rail. There is a ton of detail, much more interesting than the conclusion.
  - addicted 4y ago
    A clarification. They’ve not worked in rail. They’ve worked in hyperloop. A fantasy technology that does not, and probably never will, exist. Imagine being able to destroy the idea of constructing rail in a few paragraphs of a tiny blog and then choosing to work on hyperloop, which has all the problems mentioned about rail but also throws in creating and maintaining a vacuum pipe in addition.
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      I understand where you’re coming from. It’s really a shame that this article has the conclusion in it. I finished it feeling optimistic about our ability to implement reasonable-speed rail in the US.
    - llampx 4y ago
      Hyperloop was a fantasy project pitched by Elon so that he could continue selling more cars. The same way the big Auto companies of the early 1900's bought up railroads and trams and then tore them up, to sell more cars.
    - arinlen 4y ago
      > A clarification. They’ve not worked in rail. They’ve worked in hyperloop. A fantasy technology that does not, and probably never will, exist. Hyperloop is a marketing project which is based on the assumption that a few PR drones can be lowder than anyone with any cursory knowledge on transportation engineering. The same goes for the boring company, where the company tries very hard to pretend they invented digging holes in the ground while using COTS tunnelers.
  - rocqua 4y ago
    The article takes the premise that HSR should go 320 kph (200mph) and then explains why that is infeasible in many places. The article says much less about rail at 200kph (125mph). Which might serve to replace airplanes. Especially once CO2 externalities are priced in.
    - arinlen 4y ago
      > The article takes the premise that HSR should go 320 kph (200mph) and then explains why that is infeasible in many places. Top speed means close to nothing, and it's one of the reason why the definition of high speed rail is not tied to top speed. Great Britain has a notorious high speed railway corridor whose top speed is only around 160mph, and the reason is that the railway line was designed with the express purpose of preserving a cruise speed close to the top speed of the trains available at the time. It's absurd to talk about high speed railway if it was a drag race. The main challenge in high speed railway is making it possible for high speed trains to actually travel at speeds that high-speed trains can already reach. Lines need to overcome constraints imposed by speed, geography and infrastructure costs, and tradeoffs often lead solutions to not match optimal layouts to reach top speeds. Also, whenever a train needs to serve an intermediate station, they need to spend a great deal of time decelerating, stop at the station to serve passengers, and accelerate again. Sometimes it's feasible for infrastructure operators to spend money on a sideline to skip that station, but on some cases that's simply not realistic. Take for example Paris-Amsterdam and Paris-Cologne, which have to pass through Brussels and where the bulk of the train trip is spent passing through the inner city of Brussels alone where the top speed is 20km/h.
  - arinlen 4y ago
    > Read the article—the author prefaces with their experience riding trains all over the world and has worked in rail. That's like claiming they rode taxis a lot and has owned a car, and somehow that makes them an authority on public transportation.
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      That doesn’t track, since I was responding to a comment implying the author was ignorant of rail infrastructure outside of the US. As to the expertise, he seems unseasoned but in command of a lot of facts. Which is why I think the conclusion is wrong despite the post being interesting and informative. Unfortunately, my fellow rail enthusiasts think I’m against them because I read the article and ignored the headline and first and last few sentences. :)
b800h 4y ago
From the article: "Over longer routes, the relative hassle of getting to and from an airport instead of an HSR rail terminal is eroded by the higher speed of aircraft, even in places where the rail terminal is in a densely populated city center and the airport is way outside." I think in the case of the US, the distance makes the difference. The trouble of checking in at an airport is factored out by the length of the journey. California to Los Angeles has a target time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. The train which I take in the UK most regularly runs for 2 hours, and that feels like a relatively long journey. I think the issue is that in the US, most intercity journeys are much longer than this, which normalises air travel, meaning that rail ends up not getting a chance on the shorter routes on which it might be suitable.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  The US is the size of Europe. You'd have to take a train from Lisbon to Kiev to have a similar to say NYC to SF. A intra state high speed rail network would make a lot of sense in the US. Especially in New England. Boston - NYC should be a nice one hour and a half trip from down town to down town.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    They already have a "high speed rail network" between Boston and DC (through NYC); it's called the Amtrak Acela Express. I put "high speed" in quotes above for a reason, however...
choeger 4y ago
"functioning" is an exaggeration. Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time. They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled. They are also quite expensive, compared to planes. I think the author has a very valid point when it comes to the cost of rail tracks. It's something the proponents always conveniently ignore. On top of that, a rail station has quite a limited capacity, especially if it's inside the city. The travel time between, e.g., Berlin and Paris is something like four to five times as long as by plane. So unless someone develops a low-maintenance, high-capacity fast train, planes with ecofuel are probably going to win any fair competition.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  > low-maintenance, high-capacity fast train, planes with ecofuel is either existing? > On top of that, a rail station has quite a limited capacity, especially if it's inside the city. Traffic generated by rail station limited by capacity would require gargantuan airport to handle it, which would anyway require bus/train/car connections from within city taking even more space.
  - slyall 4y ago
    A fun stat is: Daily passengers on the New York subway system is around the same as total daily passengers on every commercial flight in the US.
    - choeger 4y ago
      I can totally believe that. But it has 470 or so stations. That makes about 10k or so daily passengers per station. That's very roughly the same as Berlin. Additionally, the trains are quite slow, which ain't a problem for a metropolitan network, but you certainly cannot compare that system to a country- or continent-wide train network.
    - fanf2 4y ago
      In London, the Kings Cross + St Pancras complex handles about 340,000 passengers per day, and is about 0.3km x 0.5km. Heathrow handles about 240,000 passengers per day, and is about 3km x 5km.
mattlondon 4y ago
London-Edinburgh is only just faster by train. There is not much in it TBH. It is about the break even point I guess. There are other benefits like you can use your phone and get up and walk around more easily. If you go first class you can actually get some work done at tables and stuff. But the flip side is train travel is often 10 or 20 times more expensive than flying, so only worth doing if you can expense it IMO (or you get some huge off-peak super saver special one-time discount or whatever)
- atq2119 4y ago
  In cases where trains and planes are equally fast, trains basically always win on comfort. Much easier boarding, better legroom, longer time of being able to sit down and focus on your work, and so on.
- Emma_Goldman 4y ago
  As someone who has made this trip countless times, London-Edinburgh is sluggish. The UK's only true high-speed network is the Eurostar from London ('HS1'), under the channel. Paris-Marseilles in 3.5 hours is a better comparator.
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  But the flip side is train travel is often 10 or 20 times more expensive than flying, so only worth doing if you can expense it IMO (or you get some huge off-peak super saver special one-time discount or whatever) The standard off-peak walk-up fare (i.e. the maximum you will ever pay) between London-Edinburgh is £82, and the peak-time fare is £176. Cheaper if you book a couple of weeks in advance. It can cost less than this to fly sometimes, but in practice not by that much unless you’re doing awkwardly-timed no-baggage Ryanair flights from Stanstead or whatever. I have done that trip hundreds of times over the years and I think I’ve only ever flown when engineering works made it in feasible to take the train. Usually it’s no competition.
  - mattlondon 4y ago
    Where are you getting those fares?! London Edinburgh flight with Ryanair is £14 (fourteen) for tomorrow. On train it is £197 for tomorrow.
arinlen 4y ago
> The author tries to make the argument that there's physical limits to high speed rail that mean it'll never catch on. But the limits are far more political than physical. The author is showing considerable ignorance on the topic. For decades it's well understood that railway top speed is lower than airwaily travel. That's irrelevant. For travelling, the key factors are door-to-door speed and rider comfort. It makes no sense to look at plane speed as the defining factor because anyone onboarding to a flight has to endure mandatory 60m-90m waits within an airport to pass through security and embark, not to mention the fact that airports are very often located tens of km outside of city centers. Meanwhile, railway travel is hop on/hop off with central stations typically right in city centers. Consequently, it's very well understood for decades now that high-speed railway is by far the fastest solution for trips up to a 600km-800km range. Above that threshold there's a tradeoff threshold with air travel, with longer travel distance favouring flights over train trips. Increasing high-speed rail's comercial speed only works to hike the crisp threshold where high-speed rail dominates air travel.
- deepthunder 4y ago
  The higher the speed the higher the cost of track maintenance.
pgorczak 4y ago
And it’s not only the city-city times being better. I’d happily spend 1-2 hours more on a train ride because I’ll have a more comfortable seat and I’ll be able to read/work/sleep/… more or less uninterrupted the whole time. Edit: also, that added comfort is exponentially higher for families who can share a table or even a private compartment.
matthewmacleod 4y ago
Indeed. I had to fly between LA and SF while on holiday earlier this year, because the equivalent rail service takes over 11 hours. I’ve done those London-Scotland routes hundreds of times over the years and they are 4.5 hours end-to-end, and as you say this isn’t even on modern high-speed infrastructure. I get that it may be impractical to introduce a continent-spanning national rail service in the US, but there are a whole bunch of costal corridors where rail is—from a functional standpoint—objectively feasible.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  It's true, there are many corridors and routes, and not just on the coasts, where HSR would be quite feasible in America. The problem is that Americans refuse to see this and refuse to accept train travel as acceptable. You can talk until you're blue in the face about how many people transit regularly between LA and SF, or between DC and NYC and Boston, or between Houston and Dallas, and Americans will simply counter that a train between NYC and LA takes too long, and therefore trains are a completely unworkable solution anywhere in the whole country. There's just no political will to implement true HSR in America and I don't think there ever will be.
holoduke 4y ago
I lìve in Europe and I have traveled maybe 10 times in my life travelling between euro countries. It's nice for city trips, but it's way more expensive than by car. And once you need to be outside of a city a train is not very convenient.
- llampx 4y ago
  I took a look a few times at Berlin->Geneva, and it would have cost more by car adding in mileage costs and gas, vs. train especially if the train booking was not last minute. That advantage vanishes when you have more than 1 occupant in the car of course. However if you can work from the train, the advantage flips back to the train. It is priceless for being able to relax and/or be productive. However, I do like the monotony and semi-meditative qualities of driving long distances. But I don't like being stuck in traffic and construction zones.
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mickdeek86 4y ago
This topic comes up periodically on HN and it typically ends in the same points: 1. Your entire country (UK) is smaller than 11 of our 50 states. The several hundred miles between London and Edinburgh pass through many smaller cities and towns, between which people travel. Between SF and LA is a pea soup restaurant and a handful of midsized, mainly agricultural settlements that can't be gotten around without a car (or pickup if we're being specific). SF/LAers aren't going to Stockton, or vice-versa. 2. Your entire continent, minus Russia, is smaller than the lower 48 states (2.5 vs 3.1 million sq miles), with a much higher population density and, again, actual places every 10 miles or so. I've bicycled across the US, there are stretches bigger than Western Europe that are full of nothin in particular. 3. Look at some population density maps. The US is light on corridors of sufficient size & density to make much sense for HSR considering the space between population centers: the Northeast (already served by HSR) and my native Chicago-Milwaukee-NW Indiana corridor (already served by commuter rail). Maybe Florida where they're actually building rail, surprisingly. Detroit area, maybe throw Ohio & Pittsburgh in (Amtrak partly covers it). The eastern 43% of China's land area (~1.6 million sq miles) contains 94% of the people (~1.3 billion people) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line In Japan you can basically draw a single, ~1400 mile line from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south that hits most of the population centers. Actually, they did that for you, it's called the Shinkansen and it is awesome. 4. This is actually the main point but I thought I'd sh!t on passenger rail first. The US has the largest and most extensively used rail network on the planet earth. We just use it to move freight, which doesn't breath, eat, use the lavatory, attempt to explode the vehicle it's on, or (to stay my sarcasm for a moment) complain when it's delayed. I haven't done the numbers here, but that probably offsets a lot more GHG/oil than replacing airports with passenger rail would. 5. To dovetail on earlier points, the US is largely defined by invisible cultural borders. To a disturbingly large extent, city people travel between cities and country people travel around the countryside. Each are often actually afraid of the other places. City people talk about 'flyover country' or make jokes about rednecks, incest, the banjo from Deliverance. Country people talk about 'inner city violence'. This is a newer, still emergent phenomenon and only partially true (hence it's placement last on my list). All this said, I love Amtrak and ride when I get a chance to take a little time off and enjoy the scenic route. You see the country from a grounds-eye view that you can't from the air, and it's pleasant to walk around the cars and talk to people you otherwise wouldn't (I once chatted with Seth Green's mom - or a woman convincingly claiming to be Seth Green's mom - on the City of New Orleans). On the longer routes eg Empire Builder you can buy one ticket and stopover at interesting places along the way and get back on tomorrow's train with the same ticket. I'm looking forward to taking the train from Anchorage to Denali next year. But I'll be flying home at Christmas, with only 5 days off.

deleted 4y ago

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dasloop 4y ago

In many HN publications the label "In USA" is applicable, the equivalent of "In mice" for many medical studies :)

1123581321 4y ago
Read the article—the author prefaces with their experience riding trains all over the world and has worked in rail. There is a ton of detail, much more interesting than the conclusion.
- addicted 4y ago
  A clarification. They’ve not worked in rail. They’ve worked in hyperloop. A fantasy technology that does not, and probably never will, exist. Imagine being able to destroy the idea of constructing rail in a few paragraphs of a tiny blog and then choosing to work on hyperloop, which has all the problems mentioned about rail but also throws in creating and maintaining a vacuum pipe in addition.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    I understand where you’re coming from. It’s really a shame that this article has the conclusion in it. I finished it feeling optimistic about our ability to implement reasonable-speed rail in the US.
  - llampx 4y ago
    Hyperloop was a fantasy project pitched by Elon so that he could continue selling more cars. The same way the big Auto companies of the early 1900's bought up railroads and trams and then tore them up, to sell more cars.
  - arinlen 4y ago
    > A clarification. They’ve not worked in rail. They’ve worked in hyperloop. A fantasy technology that does not, and probably never will, exist. Hyperloop is a marketing project which is based on the assumption that a few PR drones can be lowder than anyone with any cursory knowledge on transportation engineering. The same goes for the boring company, where the company tries very hard to pretend they invented digging holes in the ground while using COTS tunnelers.
- rocqua 4y ago
  The article takes the premise that HSR should go 320 kph (200mph) and then explains why that is infeasible in many places. The article says much less about rail at 200kph (125mph). Which might serve to replace airplanes. Especially once CO2 externalities are priced in.
  - arinlen 4y ago
    > The article takes the premise that HSR should go 320 kph (200mph) and then explains why that is infeasible in many places. Top speed means close to nothing, and it's one of the reason why the definition of high speed rail is not tied to top speed. Great Britain has a notorious high speed railway corridor whose top speed is only around 160mph, and the reason is that the railway line was designed with the express purpose of preserving a cruise speed close to the top speed of the trains available at the time. It's absurd to talk about high speed railway if it was a drag race. The main challenge in high speed railway is making it possible for high speed trains to actually travel at speeds that high-speed trains can already reach. Lines need to overcome constraints imposed by speed, geography and infrastructure costs, and tradeoffs often lead solutions to not match optimal layouts to reach top speeds. Also, whenever a train needs to serve an intermediate station, they need to spend a great deal of time decelerating, stop at the station to serve passengers, and accelerate again. Sometimes it's feasible for infrastructure operators to spend money on a sideline to skip that station, but on some cases that's simply not realistic. Take for example Paris-Amsterdam and Paris-Cologne, which have to pass through Brussels and where the bulk of the train trip is spent passing through the inner city of Brussels alone where the top speed is 20km/h.
- arinlen 4y ago
  > Read the article—the author prefaces with their experience riding trains all over the world and has worked in rail. That's like claiming they rode taxis a lot and has owned a car, and somehow that makes them an authority on public transportation.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    That doesn’t track, since I was responding to a comment implying the author was ignorant of rail infrastructure outside of the US. As to the expertise, he seems unseasoned but in command of a lot of facts. Which is why I think the conclusion is wrong despite the post being interesting and informative. Unfortunately, my fellow rail enthusiasts think I’m against them because I read the article and ignored the headline and first and last few sentences. :)

b800h 4y ago

From the article: "Over longer routes, the relative hassle of getting to and from an airport instead of an HSR rail terminal is eroded by the higher speed of aircraft, even in places where the rail terminal is in a densely populated city center and the airport is way outside." I think in the case of the US, the distance makes the difference. The trouble of checking in at an airport is factored out by the length of the journey. California to Los Angeles has a target time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. The train which I take in the UK most regularly runs for 2 hours, and that feels like a relatively long journey. I think the issue is that in the US, most intercity journeys are much longer than this, which normalises air travel, meaning that rail ends up not getting a chance on the shorter routes on which it might be suitable.

thrown_22 4y ago
The US is the size of Europe. You'd have to take a train from Lisbon to Kiev to have a similar to say NYC to SF. A intra state high speed rail network would make a lot of sense in the US. Especially in New England. Boston - NYC should be a nice one hour and a half trip from down town to down town.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  They already have a "high speed rail network" between Boston and DC (through NYC); it's called the Amtrak Acela Express. I put "high speed" in quotes above for a reason, however...

choeger 4y ago

"functioning" is an exaggeration. Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time. They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled. They are also quite expensive, compared to planes. I think the author has a very valid point when it comes to the cost of rail tracks. It's something the proponents always conveniently ignore. On top of that, a rail station has quite a limited capacity, especially if it's inside the city. The travel time between, e.g., Berlin and Paris is something like four to five times as long as by plane. So unless someone develops a low-maintenance, high-capacity fast train, planes with ecofuel are probably going to win any fair competition.

matkoniecz 4y ago
> low-maintenance, high-capacity fast train, planes with ecofuel is either existing? > On top of that, a rail station has quite a limited capacity, especially if it's inside the city. Traffic generated by rail station limited by capacity would require gargantuan airport to handle it, which would anyway require bus/train/car connections from within city taking even more space.
- slyall 4y ago
  A fun stat is: Daily passengers on the New York subway system is around the same as total daily passengers on every commercial flight in the US.
  - choeger 4y ago
    I can totally believe that. But it has 470 or so stations. That makes about 10k or so daily passengers per station. That's very roughly the same as Berlin. Additionally, the trains are quite slow, which ain't a problem for a metropolitan network, but you certainly cannot compare that system to a country- or continent-wide train network.
  - fanf2 4y ago
    In London, the Kings Cross + St Pancras complex handles about 340,000 passengers per day, and is about 0.3km x 0.5km. Heathrow handles about 240,000 passengers per day, and is about 3km x 5km.

mattlondon 4y ago

London-Edinburgh is only just faster by train. There is not much in it TBH. It is about the break even point I guess. There are other benefits like you can use your phone and get up and walk around more easily. If you go first class you can actually get some work done at tables and stuff. But the flip side is train travel is often 10 or 20 times more expensive than flying, so only worth doing if you can expense it IMO (or you get some huge off-peak super saver special one-time discount or whatever)

atq2119 4y ago
In cases where trains and planes are equally fast, trains basically always win on comfort. Much easier boarding, better legroom, longer time of being able to sit down and focus on your work, and so on.
Emma_Goldman 4y ago
As someone who has made this trip countless times, London-Edinburgh is sluggish. The UK's only true high-speed network is the Eurostar from London ('HS1'), under the channel. Paris-Marseilles in 3.5 hours is a better comparator.
matthewmacleod 4y ago
But the flip side is train travel is often 10 or 20 times more expensive than flying, so only worth doing if you can expense it IMO (or you get some huge off-peak super saver special one-time discount or whatever) The standard off-peak walk-up fare (i.e. the maximum you will ever pay) between London-Edinburgh is £82, and the peak-time fare is £176. Cheaper if you book a couple of weeks in advance. It can cost less than this to fly sometimes, but in practice not by that much unless you’re doing awkwardly-timed no-baggage Ryanair flights from Stanstead or whatever. I have done that trip hundreds of times over the years and I think I’ve only ever flown when engineering works made it in feasible to take the train. Usually it’s no competition.
- mattlondon 4y ago
  Where are you getting those fares?! London Edinburgh flight with Ryanair is £14 (fourteen) for tomorrow. On train it is £197 for tomorrow.

arinlen 4y ago

> The author tries to make the argument that there's physical limits to high speed rail that mean it'll never catch on. But the limits are far more political than physical. The author is showing considerable ignorance on the topic. For decades it's well understood that railway top speed is lower than airwaily travel. That's irrelevant. For travelling, the key factors are door-to-door speed and rider comfort. It makes no sense to look at plane speed as the defining factor because anyone onboarding to a flight has to endure mandatory 60m-90m waits within an airport to pass through security and embark, not to mention the fact that airports are very often located tens of km outside of city centers. Meanwhile, railway travel is hop on/hop off with central stations typically right in city centers. Consequently, it's very well understood for decades now that high-speed railway is by far the fastest solution for trips up to a 600km-800km range. Above that threshold there's a tradeoff threshold with air travel, with longer travel distance favouring flights over train trips. Increasing high-speed rail's comercial speed only works to hike the crisp threshold where high-speed rail dominates air travel.

deepthunder 4y ago
The higher the speed the higher the cost of track maintenance.

pgorczak 4y ago

And it’s not only the city-city times being better. I’d happily spend 1-2 hours more on a train ride because I’ll have a more comfortable seat and I’ll be able to read/work/sleep/… more or less uninterrupted the whole time. Edit: also, that added comfort is exponentially higher for families who can share a table or even a private compartment.

matthewmacleod 4y ago

Indeed. I had to fly between LA and SF while on holiday earlier this year, because the equivalent rail service takes over 11 hours. I’ve done those London-Scotland routes hundreds of times over the years and they are 4.5 hours end-to-end, and as you say this isn’t even on modern high-speed infrastructure. I get that it may be impractical to introduce a continent-spanning national rail service in the US, but there are a whole bunch of costal corridors where rail is—from a functional standpoint—objectively feasible.

midoridensha 4y ago
It's true, there are many corridors and routes, and not just on the coasts, where HSR would be quite feasible in America. The problem is that Americans refuse to see this and refuse to accept train travel as acceptable. You can talk until you're blue in the face about how many people transit regularly between LA and SF, or between DC and NYC and Boston, or between Houston and Dallas, and Americans will simply counter that a train between NYC and LA takes too long, and therefore trains are a completely unworkable solution anywhere in the whole country. There's just no political will to implement true HSR in America and I don't think there ever will be.

holoduke 4y ago

I lìve in Europe and I have traveled maybe 10 times in my life travelling between euro countries. It's nice for city trips, but it's way more expensive than by car. And once you need to be outside of a city a train is not very convenient.

llampx 4y ago
I took a look a few times at Berlin->Geneva, and it would have cost more by car adding in mileage costs and gas, vs. train especially if the train booking was not last minute. That advantage vanishes when you have more than 1 occupant in the car of course. However if you can work from the train, the advantage flips back to the train. It is priceless for being able to relax and/or be productive. However, I do like the monotony and semi-meditative qualities of driving long distances. But I don't like being stuck in traffic and construction zones.

deleted 4y ago

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mickdeek86 4y ago

This topic comes up periodically on HN and it typically ends in the same points: 1. Your entire country (UK) is smaller than 11 of our 50 states. The several hundred miles between London and Edinburgh pass through many smaller cities and towns, between which people travel. Between SF and LA is a pea soup restaurant and a handful of midsized, mainly agricultural settlements that can't be gotten around without a car (or pickup if we're being specific). SF/LAers aren't going to Stockton, or vice-versa. 2. Your entire continent, minus Russia, is smaller than the lower 48 states (2.5 vs 3.1 million sq miles), with a much higher population density and, again, actual places every 10 miles or so. I've bicycled across the US, there are stretches bigger than Western Europe that are full of nothin in particular. 3. Look at some population density maps. The US is light on corridors of sufficient size & density to make much sense for HSR considering the space between population centers: the Northeast (already served by HSR) and my native Chicago-Milwaukee-NW Indiana corridor (already served by commuter rail). Maybe Florida where they're actually building rail, surprisingly. Detroit area, maybe throw Ohio & Pittsburgh in (Amtrak partly covers it). The eastern 43% of China's land area (~1.6 million sq miles) contains 94% of the people (~1.3 billion people) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line In Japan you can basically draw a single, ~1400 mile line from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south that hits most of the population centers. Actually, they did that for you, it's called the Shinkansen and it is awesome. 4. This is actually the main point but I thought I'd sh!t on passenger rail first. The US has the largest and most extensively used rail network on the planet earth. We just use it to move freight, which doesn't breath, eat, use the lavatory, attempt to explode the vehicle it's on, or (to stay my sarcasm for a moment) complain when it's delayed. I haven't done the numbers here, but that probably offsets a lot more GHG/oil than replacing airports with passenger rail would. 5. To dovetail on earlier points, the US is largely defined by invisible cultural borders. To a disturbingly large extent, city people travel between cities and country people travel around the countryside. Each are often actually afraid of the other places. City people talk about 'flyover country' or make jokes about rednecks, incest, the banjo from Deliverance. Country people talk about 'inner city violence'. This is a newer, still emergent phenomenon and only partially true (hence it's placement last on my list). All this said, I love Amtrak and ride when I get a chance to take a little time off and enjoy the scenic route. You see the country from a grounds-eye view that you can't from the air, and it's pleasant to walk around the cars and talk to people you otherwise wouldn't (I once chatted with Seth Green's mom - or a woman convincingly claiming to be Seth Green's mom - on the City of New Orleans). On the longer routes eg Empire Builder you can buy one ticket and stopover at interesting places along the way and get back on tomorrow's train with the same ticket. I'm looking forward to taking the train from Anchorage to Denali next year. But I'll be flying home at Christmas, with only 5 days off.