5 ms·

I don’t know the answer to either of your questions. Is track more expensive than new high-speed trains?

foota 3y ago
Construction is expensive, and purchasing right of way in populated areas is ridiculously expensive. Short tracks are more expensive because you want to do inconvenient things in order to keep them short (like tunneling and building bridges) instead of taking the path of least resistance. You need all of these things for a good high speel rail, but you need a lot of it to even improve the existing rail. There's some compromises you could make to improve the existing system, but there's not much desire for it I think since it'd still largely be a many billion dollar long term project. I think the opinion is that it's not worth spending all that unless it's transformative (i.e., the marginal benefit of a 2 hour vs 3 and a half hour train ride is small compared to the benefit of a 3 and a half hr ride to a 1 hour ride since at that point you have realistic commutes and such).
- ghaff 3y ago
  1 hr Seattle to Portland probably doesn’t even really make it commuting distance because very few people are going to live and work close enough to the endpoints to keep things to 90 minutes total. Boston to NYC is 4 hours or so and that’s useful for a lot of purposes although that’s admittedly in part because driving and parking in Manhattan is so awful. (I could drive from my house to Manhattan faster but I hardly ever do.)
  - georgeoliver 3y ago
    Why is 90 minutes the magic number? For example lots of people commute from New Haven to New York City, where the train ride alone is 90+ minutes.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Manhattan is sort of a special case and I can tell you from personal experience that 90 minutes is pretty bad even if a lot of it is spent on a train. I commuted into Boston a few days a week when it was about 90 minutes door to door and IMO it was not sustainable. If I go into my downtown office now which I do rarely it’s 2 hours. That some people are forced into super-commutes now and then doesn’t make it a really sustainable most days situation. So you’re up by 6am or earlier and you’re not getting home until 8pm or later depending on your work hours.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      And it is an awful existence. People do it for the chance to earn more money, but I would not wish that quality of life on my enemies.
  - rob74 3y ago
    I don't think commuting should be the main focus - if you want HSR to make sense ecologically, it should replace existing car and airplane trips, not enable people to make longer commutes.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I’m not from the area but does anyone actually fly from SEA to PDX assuming they have a car? It’s not like SeaTac is even that close to Seattle. And depending on where you live and destination plans it’s hard for me to imagine trading a less than 3 hour drive for a train trip.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - LeanderK 3y ago
        I can't relate to this at all. I would trade driving for a train trip if the total duration is somewhat comparable (or even a little bit longer), especially if I would have to make the trip regularly. I don't think flying is convenient but taking a HSR-train is.
        ghaff 3y ago
        It depends on a lot of factors. Where do you live relative to the train station? How annoying is the drive? Do you want/need a car on the other end? New York checks two of those boxes for me. (Getting to the train is out of the way.) But a lot of places that could be train trips I’d want a car once I got there.
      - laurex 3y ago
        From the number of flights offered, I think it’s much more common than you might think. My guess is that part of the reason has to to with Seattle’s very very bad traffic. I once spent 4 hours traveling less than 15 miles on a drive heading south from the city center, and I don’t think that’s even super anomalous.
    - 3y ago
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    In a WFH or occasional-office-visit basis, that's more tractable as the trip wouldn't be made on a daily basis. Though another option is to both densify development near stations and to create a well-functioning feeder transit system to service areas further out. If those can operate at, say, 35 mph / 55 kph average speed, and assuming a 5 minute walkable commute to the work endpoint (jobs are easier to cluster near stations than housing), and with well-timed transfers, then the feed-in distance could be up to about 15 miles / 23 km from the actual HSR station. Note that average speed is usually about half of top speed, so these would be relatively high-speed commuter-rail systems. Note that the typical average speed of an urban bus, say, is about 5-15 mph (8-24 kph).
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Adding to this, there's a pretty interesting paradox of transportation infrastructure as relates to land values, and a characteristic I've noticed of many high-speed rail systems. The creation of transportation infrastructure can convert land from low-value (as reflected by market prices) to high, and this has very often occurred. The US Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, was seen by many as a boondoggle, and indeed traveled through all but completely unpopulated (by European settlers) lands. But development quickly followed. One settlement bypassed by the railroad was Denver, Colorado. That city raised funds to create a spur line to the Transcontinental Railroad in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and in the decade following that line's completion, Denver's population exploded tenfold, from 5,000 to over 50,000 inhabitants. Many commuter streetcar and heavy rail lines were created as, or in partnership with, real estate developments, and profits from land speculation were often a very substantial portion of overall profits from such operations. The flip side is that once land values have increased, establishing new rights of way becomes extraordinarily expensive. Which means that backfilling high-speed rail into an extant prosperous region is insanely expensive, not only in direct land acquisition costs but in the costs of passing legislation and litigating various objections to such projects. Of the major high-speed rail projects created since 1950, at least three, Japan's Shinkansen, France's TGV, and China's CRH, all seem to me to have benefitted either from being developed in a post-war period of depressed property values (Japan & France) or emerged as a greenfield development through regions in which property values had not yet appreciated ... and in which private property ownership isn't a well-developed institution in the first place (China). The very slowly-progressing process of high speed rail in California is in many ways due to both the high land valuations of that state and a political environment in which legal objections to such projects are easy to mount. The easiest places to proceed with the project are in the relatively depopulated and low-land-value Central Valley. Geography also plays a role in constraining potential routes, most especially within the San Francisco Bay Area (and especially especially along the San Francisco Peninsula, some of the highest-valued land in the world), and in crossing the Tehachapi mountains at the southern end of the Central Valley, through which there are very few viable routes. These create choke points by which interests opposed to, or simply looking to benefit disproportionately from, the project can focus obstruction efforts, and they have. In darker moments, I reflect that it might be opportune to wait for a major San Andreas Fault movement to press forward with rail plans, whilst opposition is both defunded and occupied with other concerns.

Construction is expensive, and purchasing right of way in populated areas is ridiculously expensive. Short tracks are more expensive because you want to do inconvenient things in order to keep them short (like tunneling and building bridges) instead of taking the path of least resistance. You need all of these things for a good high speel rail, but you need a lot of it to even improve the existing rail. There's some compromises you could make to improve the existing system, but there's not much desire for it I think since it'd still largely be a many billion dollar long term project. I think the opinion is that it's not worth spending all that unless it's transformative (i.e., the marginal benefit of a 2 hour vs 3 and a half hour train ride is small compared to the benefit of a 3 and a half hr ride to a 1 hour ride since at that point you have realistic commutes and such).

ghaff 3y ago
1 hr Seattle to Portland probably doesn’t even really make it commuting distance because very few people are going to live and work close enough to the endpoints to keep things to 90 minutes total. Boston to NYC is 4 hours or so and that’s useful for a lot of purposes although that’s admittedly in part because driving and parking in Manhattan is so awful. (I could drive from my house to Manhattan faster but I hardly ever do.)
- georgeoliver 3y ago
  Why is 90 minutes the magic number? For example lots of people commute from New Haven to New York City, where the train ride alone is 90+ minutes.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Manhattan is sort of a special case and I can tell you from personal experience that 90 minutes is pretty bad even if a lot of it is spent on a train. I commuted into Boston a few days a week when it was about 90 minutes door to door and IMO it was not sustainable. If I go into my downtown office now which I do rarely it’s 2 hours. That some people are forced into super-commutes now and then doesn’t make it a really sustainable most days situation. So you’re up by 6am or earlier and you’re not getting home until 8pm or later depending on your work hours.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    And it is an awful existence. People do it for the chance to earn more money, but I would not wish that quality of life on my enemies.
- rob74 3y ago
  I don't think commuting should be the main focus - if you want HSR to make sense ecologically, it should replace existing car and airplane trips, not enable people to make longer commutes.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I’m not from the area but does anyone actually fly from SEA to PDX assuming they have a car? It’s not like SeaTac is even that close to Seattle. And depending on where you live and destination plans it’s hard for me to imagine trading a less than 3 hour drive for a train trip.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - LeanderK 3y ago
      I can't relate to this at all. I would trade driving for a train trip if the total duration is somewhat comparable (or even a little bit longer), especially if I would have to make the trip regularly. I don't think flying is convenient but taking a HSR-train is.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        It depends on a lot of factors. Where do you live relative to the train station? How annoying is the drive? Do you want/need a car on the other end? New York checks two of those boxes for me. (Getting to the train is out of the way.) But a lot of places that could be train trips I’d want a car once I got there.
    - laurex 3y ago
      From the number of flights offered, I think it’s much more common than you might think. My guess is that part of the reason has to to with Seattle’s very very bad traffic. I once spent 4 hours traveling less than 15 miles on a drive heading south from the city center, and I don’t think that’s even super anomalous.
  - 3y ago
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  In a WFH or occasional-office-visit basis, that's more tractable as the trip wouldn't be made on a daily basis. Though another option is to both densify development near stations and to create a well-functioning feeder transit system to service areas further out. If those can operate at, say, 35 mph / 55 kph average speed, and assuming a 5 minute walkable commute to the work endpoint (jobs are easier to cluster near stations than housing), and with well-timed transfers, then the feed-in distance could be up to about 15 miles / 23 km from the actual HSR station. Note that average speed is usually about half of top speed, so these would be relatively high-speed commuter-rail systems. Note that the typical average speed of an urban bus, say, is about 5-15 mph (8-24 kph).
dredmorbius 3y ago
Adding to this, there's a pretty interesting paradox of transportation infrastructure as relates to land values, and a characteristic I've noticed of many high-speed rail systems. The creation of transportation infrastructure can convert land from low-value (as reflected by market prices) to high, and this has very often occurred. The US Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, was seen by many as a boondoggle, and indeed traveled through all but completely unpopulated (by European settlers) lands. But development quickly followed. One settlement bypassed by the railroad was Denver, Colorado. That city raised funds to create a spur line to the Transcontinental Railroad in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and in the decade following that line's completion, Denver's population exploded tenfold, from 5,000 to over 50,000 inhabitants. Many commuter streetcar and heavy rail lines were created as, or in partnership with, real estate developments, and profits from land speculation were often a very substantial portion of overall profits from such operations. The flip side is that once land values have increased, establishing new rights of way becomes extraordinarily expensive. Which means that backfilling high-speed rail into an extant prosperous region is insanely expensive, not only in direct land acquisition costs but in the costs of passing legislation and litigating various objections to such projects. Of the major high-speed rail projects created since 1950, at least three, Japan's Shinkansen, France's TGV, and China's CRH, all seem to me to have benefitted either from being developed in a post-war period of depressed property values (Japan & France) or emerged as a greenfield development through regions in which property values had not yet appreciated ... and in which private property ownership isn't a well-developed institution in the first place (China). The very slowly-progressing process of high speed rail in California is in many ways due to both the high land valuations of that state and a political environment in which legal objections to such projects are easy to mount. The easiest places to proceed with the project are in the relatively depopulated and low-land-value Central Valley. Geography also plays a role in constraining potential routes, most especially within the San Francisco Bay Area (and especially especially along the San Francisco Peninsula, some of the highest-valued land in the world), and in crossing the Tehachapi mountains at the southern end of the Central Valley, through which there are very few viable routes. These create choke points by which interests opposed to, or simply looking to benefit disproportionately from, the project can focus obstruction efforts, and they have. In darker moments, I reflect that it might be opportune to wait for a major San Andreas Fault movement to press forward with rail plans, whilst opposition is both defunded and occupied with other concerns.