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Grüße. I wonder if there were more trains there would you take it. A reasonable observation many North Americans make is that it would just take too long to get

Grüße. I wonder if there were more trains there would you take it. A reasonable observation many North Americans make is that it would just take too long to get anywhere by train, unlike in Europe. AKA 300 years is old vs. 300 miles is far.

bobthepanda 3y ago
The vast majority of Americans live either east of the Mississippi or on the West coast at densities not dissimilar to Europe. You’ll never take HSR from NYC to LAX but Chicago or Atlanta from NYC is roughly the same distance as Paris to Berlin, and there’s a bunch of cities on the way as well.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  I would think the densities are still much smaller since most people live in car dependent suburbs around the city.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Not all countries with large rail networks have great suburban public transport either; the UK comes to mind. Even in a mostly suburban metropolitan area, most people are still quite a ways from the main airport, which is usually on the extreme of one side of a metropolitan area. You can have multiple train stations per city because of their much lower footprint and nuisance level, and generally speaking most of the time savings in rail vs air is access time to the station/airport. (Truly high speed services can just skip the suburban stations if there truly is demand for this, but generally speaking the time for an additional station is measured in single-digit minutes.)
    - laurencerowe 3y ago
      While the UK does not have great suburban public transport it is far better than what is available in most of the US. Ironically car dependent cities like LA were built out as streetcar suburbs so they’re not really all that different to London’s ‘metroland’ suburbs built out around tube lines. The big difference is the job centres are far more distributed. When offices as well as homes are widely distributed public transport becomes very tricky.
- zwieback 3y ago
  The metro areas are dense and tend to have decent public transport. The problem is in the smaller towns and rural areas. When I ride my bike around in the Willamette Valley I can go miles and miles without hitting even a small town. In Germany the next sizable town is usually minutes away.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > In Germany the next sizable town is usually minutes away. Maybe in Germany, but France has barely populated areas and yet we have one the biggest high-speed rail network on the planet. In fact, the fact that France is the biggest European country after Russia is probably the main reason high speed rails was invested on back in the 70s: the bigger your country the more you need high speed rail.
    - kingofpandora 3y ago
      Second biggest ... if you include overseas territories!
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        Right, Ukraine pre-invasion was bigger than France without French Guyana, but now they have a tough fight ahead if they want to claim that title again :/
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Most Americans live in metro areas; the figure for the United States is 80% according to the census. High speed rail is not going to do a lot of good in South Dakota, but we can serve most Americans with some type of decent rail without contorting ourselves. And the bar is on the floor since a lot of Amtrak is not even a single round trip seven days a week.
nickvanw 3y ago
Here in the PNW there is basically one corridor that would make sense as a semi-high speed (160+ kph) rail, which is Portland-Seattle-Vancouver. They are all under 200 miles from each other and connected by one road that is often very congested. The current Amtrak route is not frequent, fast or cheap enough to be a good alternative to driving for most people. Hourly service between them would be a boon to the whole area, and allow for a ton of flights to not happen between the cities for connecting traffic.
- ISL 3y ago
  Especially if that service reached PAE, SEA, PDX airports. There's a ton of SEA->PDX flights. https://www.portseattle.org/sea-tac/flight-status?flight_date=2023-08-04&arr_or_depart=D&airline=&arrive_city=PDX&flightNo=&datetime_start=&datetime_end= https://www.portseattle.org/sea-tac/flight-status?flight_dat... shows 23 unique aircraft flying SEA->PDX today and 32 unique aircraft flying PDX->SEA At ~$80/seat one-way and ~80 passengers/flight, that's >$100M/yr in revenue. Existing trains take 3.5 hr for the journey. Existing flights take 1 hr for the flight + time spent in security, so trains aren't that far off. Furthermore, there are ~30,000 cars traveling each way each day along I-5 between Seattle and Portland (https://www.chehalisbasinstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/WSDOT-I-5-Chehalis-Flood-Report_Final.pdf https://www.chehalisbasinstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/201...) . Speedy train service really would make a difference.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    Any idea of the cost of that commute (multiplied by 30,000)? There must be a business case in this surely, even if it’s worked out based on minimum wage as that’s a lot of commuters.
vidarh 3y ago
While there are distances that are certainly "too long", there are very few regions in the US where the majority of the population is so spread out that more trains wouldn't enable a lot of travel to nearby towns and cities even if it's not attractive for long distance travel. E.g. I got in an argument with someone a while back who insisted on using Montana as an example, but while Montana is sparsely populated, Southern Montana had Amtrak passenger service until 1979 (ironically the only Amtrak service currently serving Montana goes through some of the sparsest populated Northern parts of the state as part of the Empire Builder route), and has a density and distance between the main towns comparable to places in Norway with a perfectly viable regular passenger service. It's not like you need to have good train links everywhere to improve things, but often the point is not to connect big cities far away with each other but to serve as extra life lines which makes it viable to move further out of the big cities for those in between. That means the relationship needs to be reversed from what Americans are used to: You can't look at where there is demand for transport now. You need to look at where people might want to live or want to work, or where you want to encourage growth, and where better transport might encourage that. And then you need to take a 20+ year horizon and commit to it, because only once the links are there will it start factoring into peoples decisions about where to move, and it will take many years before demand shifts. This is less obvious with cars because as long as there's a road people can forgive a lot. It doesn't help to have rails if there are no trains running on them. And then you need to consider that it's ok to lose money on a per passenger basis on infrastructure if it promotes economic growth or positively affects other factors (e.g. reduces the amount of car congestion and environmental effects). You should still look at the economy of course, but take all the factors into account, because it often changes the calculations drastically.
mschuster91 3y ago
> A reasonable observation many North Americans make is that it would just take too long to get anywhere by train, unlike in Europe. Well, China has built a shit ton of high speed rail across their country. There is nothing preventing the US from doing just the same. NYC <-> LA is like, what, 4000km? Sounds insane at a quick glance, but a 500 km/h maglev train makes that an 8 hour ride, compared to a 6h flight plus 1h "dead" time for boarding, luggage, and security theatre. Not much of a difference. A 300 km/h "classic" high speed rail like the German ICE will take 13h, but hey even that is manageable. And unlike Europe, y'all have the advantage that your land is barely occupied by anything but a few farms.
- jamesaurichs 3y ago
  US is actually smart enough to avoid big infrastructure debts. According to wikipedia, China has a 900B debt from high speed rails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    I don't know why your comment was marked as dead, vouched it as you make a good point. The thing is, debt isn't bad per se - having a strong rail network can actually enable far far bigger returns. The US is the perfect example actually... railroads were what enabled "going west" from the East Coast where the European settlers landed. If you have a strong rail network, you can move a ton of goods (or people) with barely any emissions, leagues better than airplanes, cars and trucks - only ships have a better efficiency in fuel consumption/CO2 emissions per passenger/ton kilometer. And rail infrastructure can hold up insanely long... here in Germany we're still using signalling systems and rails literally built way before Hitler, before the first German democratic government, back when we still had a Kaiser. Spread the 900 billion debt over 100 years lifetime and whoops, pretty cheap, isn't it?
    - jamesaurichs 3y ago
      Thanks. I think having a few solid rails for really populars route is justified. The issue is building too many of these rails to where ridership is not even enough to produce a profit in the beginning, let alone sustain it forever. Also, cities grow and die. Can you imagine if US built out an expensive high speed rail from New York to Detroit? or Seattle to Portland?
laurencerowe 3y ago
Most people in the US live in urban areas and most travel is not that far. It only takes too long to get places by train because the service is poor and public transit is lacking. You’re never going to take a train coast to coast but it’s be nice to take one from San Francisco to Sacramento, the state capital 75 miles away didn’t end up taking a nearly three hours.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  Yes, there’s a new high speed train from Miami to Orlando, but you would have to rent a car when you get to either end anyway because there’s no realistic public transit in all of Florida. By the time you rent a car, you might as well drive around instead of taking the train.
  - laurencerowe 3y ago
    I’ve not been but Miami comes in the middle of a ranking of public transit cities in the US so I could imagine the trip working well the other way around. https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article235161502.html https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/... How practical it is will depend on the place. Yes lots of America has been built as suburban sprawl but there are lots of slightly more urban places too where modern regional rail would be a huge improvement over sitting in traffic. The frustrating thing about living in the bay area is that they ripped up a lot of rail in the 60s and replaced them with roads. Now those roads are clogged and journeys by car take longer than journeys by rail did back then.
ska 3y ago
This is only sort of true. There are lots of population dense areas of North America that wouldn't look that different than much of Europe. E.g. NYC to Boston is shorter than Paris to Frankfurt. The main problem is that the train infrastructure where exists is old and very slow, and typically passenger trains have lower priority than freight. The end result are slow, often grubby, expensive (e.g. more than flights), trains with inconvenient sparse schedules and poor services. Not exactly compelling.

bobthepanda 3y ago

The vast majority of Americans live either east of the Mississippi or on the West coast at densities not dissimilar to Europe. You’ll never take HSR from NYC to LAX but Chicago or Atlanta from NYC is roughly the same distance as Paris to Berlin, and there’s a bunch of cities on the way as well.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
I would think the densities are still much smaller since most people live in car dependent suburbs around the city.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Not all countries with large rail networks have great suburban public transport either; the UK comes to mind. Even in a mostly suburban metropolitan area, most people are still quite a ways from the main airport, which is usually on the extreme of one side of a metropolitan area. You can have multiple train stations per city because of their much lower footprint and nuisance level, and generally speaking most of the time savings in rail vs air is access time to the station/airport. (Truly high speed services can just skip the suburban stations if there truly is demand for this, but generally speaking the time for an additional station is measured in single-digit minutes.)
  - laurencerowe 3y ago
    While the UK does not have great suburban public transport it is far better than what is available in most of the US. Ironically car dependent cities like LA were built out as streetcar suburbs so they’re not really all that different to London’s ‘metroland’ suburbs built out around tube lines. The big difference is the job centres are far more distributed. When offices as well as homes are widely distributed public transport becomes very tricky.
zwieback 3y ago
The metro areas are dense and tend to have decent public transport. The problem is in the smaller towns and rural areas. When I ride my bike around in the Willamette Valley I can go miles and miles without hitting even a small town. In Germany the next sizable town is usually minutes away.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > In Germany the next sizable town is usually minutes away. Maybe in Germany, but France has barely populated areas and yet we have one the biggest high-speed rail network on the planet. In fact, the fact that France is the biggest European country after Russia is probably the main reason high speed rails was invested on back in the 70s: the bigger your country the more you need high speed rail.
  - kingofpandora 3y ago
    Second biggest ... if you include overseas territories!
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Right, Ukraine pre-invasion was bigger than France without French Guyana, but now they have a tough fight ahead if they want to claim that title again :/
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Most Americans live in metro areas; the figure for the United States is 80% according to the census. High speed rail is not going to do a lot of good in South Dakota, but we can serve most Americans with some type of decent rail without contorting ourselves. And the bar is on the floor since a lot of Amtrak is not even a single round trip seven days a week.

nickvanw 3y ago

Here in the PNW there is basically one corridor that would make sense as a semi-high speed (160+ kph) rail, which is Portland-Seattle-Vancouver. They are all under 200 miles from each other and connected by one road that is often very congested. The current Amtrak route is not frequent, fast or cheap enough to be a good alternative to driving for most people. Hourly service between them would be a boon to the whole area, and allow for a ton of flights to not happen between the cities for connecting traffic.

ISL 3y ago
Especially if that service reached PAE, SEA, PDX airports. There's a ton of SEA->PDX flights. https://www.portseattle.org/sea-tac/flight-status?flight_date=2023-08-04&arr_or_depart=D&airline=&arrive_city=PDX&flightNo=&datetime_start=&datetime_end= https://www.portseattle.org/sea-tac/flight-status?flight_dat... shows 23 unique aircraft flying SEA->PDX today and 32 unique aircraft flying PDX->SEA At ~$80/seat one-way and ~80 passengers/flight, that's >$100M/yr in revenue. Existing trains take 3.5 hr for the journey. Existing flights take 1 hr for the flight + time spent in security, so trains aren't that far off. Furthermore, there are ~30,000 cars traveling each way each day along I-5 between Seattle and Portland (https://www.chehalisbasinstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/WSDOT-I-5-Chehalis-Flood-Report_Final.pdf https://www.chehalisbasinstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/201...) . Speedy train service really would make a difference.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  Any idea of the cost of that commute (multiplied by 30,000)? There must be a business case in this surely, even if it’s worked out based on minimum wage as that’s a lot of commuters.

vidarh 3y ago

While there are distances that are certainly "too long", there are very few regions in the US where the majority of the population is so spread out that more trains wouldn't enable a lot of travel to nearby towns and cities even if it's not attractive for long distance travel. E.g. I got in an argument with someone a while back who insisted on using Montana as an example, but while Montana is sparsely populated, Southern Montana had Amtrak passenger service until 1979 (ironically the only Amtrak service currently serving Montana goes through some of the sparsest populated Northern parts of the state as part of the Empire Builder route), and has a density and distance between the main towns comparable to places in Norway with a perfectly viable regular passenger service. It's not like you need to have good train links everywhere to improve things, but often the point is not to connect big cities far away with each other but to serve as extra life lines which makes it viable to move further out of the big cities for those in between. That means the relationship needs to be reversed from what Americans are used to: You can't look at where there is demand for transport now. You need to look at where people might want to live or want to work, or where you want to encourage growth, and where better transport might encourage that. And then you need to take a 20+ year horizon and commit to it, because only once the links are there will it start factoring into peoples decisions about where to move, and it will take many years before demand shifts. This is less obvious with cars because as long as there's a road people can forgive a lot. It doesn't help to have rails if there are no trains running on them. And then you need to consider that it's ok to lose money on a per passenger basis on infrastructure if it promotes economic growth or positively affects other factors (e.g. reduces the amount of car congestion and environmental effects). You should still look at the economy of course, but take all the factors into account, because it often changes the calculations drastically.

mschuster91 3y ago

> A reasonable observation many North Americans make is that it would just take too long to get anywhere by train, unlike in Europe. Well, China has built a shit ton of high speed rail across their country. There is nothing preventing the US from doing just the same. NYC <-> LA is like, what, 4000km? Sounds insane at a quick glance, but a 500 km/h maglev train makes that an 8 hour ride, compared to a 6h flight plus 1h "dead" time for boarding, luggage, and security theatre. Not much of a difference. A 300 km/h "classic" high speed rail like the German ICE will take 13h, but hey even that is manageable. And unlike Europe, y'all have the advantage that your land is barely occupied by anything but a few farms.

jamesaurichs 3y ago
US is actually smart enough to avoid big infrastructure debts. According to wikipedia, China has a 900B debt from high speed rails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  I don't know why your comment was marked as dead, vouched it as you make a good point. The thing is, debt isn't bad per se - having a strong rail network can actually enable far far bigger returns. The US is the perfect example actually... railroads were what enabled "going west" from the East Coast where the European settlers landed. If you have a strong rail network, you can move a ton of goods (or people) with barely any emissions, leagues better than airplanes, cars and trucks - only ships have a better efficiency in fuel consumption/CO2 emissions per passenger/ton kilometer. And rail infrastructure can hold up insanely long... here in Germany we're still using signalling systems and rails literally built way before Hitler, before the first German democratic government, back when we still had a Kaiser. Spread the 900 billion debt over 100 years lifetime and whoops, pretty cheap, isn't it?
  - jamesaurichs 3y ago
    Thanks. I think having a few solid rails for really populars route is justified. The issue is building too many of these rails to where ridership is not even enough to produce a profit in the beginning, let alone sustain it forever. Also, cities grow and die. Can you imagine if US built out an expensive high speed rail from New York to Detroit? or Seattle to Portland?

laurencerowe 3y ago

Most people in the US live in urban areas and most travel is not that far. It only takes too long to get places by train because the service is poor and public transit is lacking. You’re never going to take a train coast to coast but it’s be nice to take one from San Francisco to Sacramento, the state capital 75 miles away didn’t end up taking a nearly three hours.

dougmwne 3y ago
Yes, there’s a new high speed train from Miami to Orlando, but you would have to rent a car when you get to either end anyway because there’s no realistic public transit in all of Florida. By the time you rent a car, you might as well drive around instead of taking the train.
- laurencerowe 3y ago
  I’ve not been but Miami comes in the middle of a ranking of public transit cities in the US so I could imagine the trip working well the other way around. https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article235161502.html https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/... How practical it is will depend on the place. Yes lots of America has been built as suburban sprawl but there are lots of slightly more urban places too where modern regional rail would be a huge improvement over sitting in traffic. The frustrating thing about living in the bay area is that they ripped up a lot of rail in the 60s and replaced them with roads. Now those roads are clogged and journeys by car take longer than journeys by rail did back then.

ska 3y ago

This is only sort of true. There are lots of population dense areas of North America that wouldn't look that different than much of Europe. E.g. NYC to Boston is shorter than Paris to Frankfurt. The main problem is that the train infrastructure where exists is old and very slow, and typically passenger trains have lower priority than freight. The end result are slow, often grubby, expensive (e.g. more than flights), trains with inconvenient sparse schedules and poor services. Not exactly compelling.