6 ms·

Texas could get a bullet train between Houston and Dallas

39 points by elorant 3y ago

yurishimo 3y ago
I’ll believe it when I see it. Maybe the Texas legislature is taking notes on south Florida, an unlikely success story for regional travel in the US. But the thing about Florida is that most of it is a swamp that people don’t want to live on. That is not true of land in Texas. Without eminent domain, I don’t see how Texas will acquire the land necessary to make this project a reality.
- throwaw1yyy 3y ago
  There is wide support in FL for it from people on both sides of the aisles. The hang up was always the cost (not the environmental cost, likes the birds or whatever) and Brightline being privately owned meant zero hang ups FL is a forward looking state: it looks forward to different future than Cali dysfunction
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  How come there was no objection like this for all the land for the highways, highway expansion and surface car parks? Where did that land come from?
dangus 3y ago
I'll take this opportunity to address the rail haters' main point against high speed rail in America: the fact that we all need cars at our destinations, America is too big and spread out, etc. Every time I hear that argument I have to point out the millions of American short hop regional flights that are taken each year. Millions of people already use rideshares, taxis, and rent cars at their destinations. Just observe the scale of your own airport's rental car center. I think that high speed rail in Texas can sustain itself and be more economically and environmentally efficient almost solely on business travelers whose status quo involves driving between city centers and being paid for mileage. A business traveler between Dallas and Houston will bill their company for 240 miles. At IRS standard 65.5 cents per mile, that's $157 worth of total cost being A high speed train could probably be a profit-generating enterprise at half that ticket price, and businesses would pay a premium for it to save time over driving. Also, the business travelers can do work while on the train rather than focusing on driving. That cost and time savings can buy a lot of Uber rides and parking garage fees.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I'm not a rail hater. I typically take the train to NYC although that's because I hate driving into Manhattan and getting into the city from the NYC airports is awful. However, I used to travel to Houston all the time from New Orleans and I flew. That's more like a 5 hour drive (vs. 3-4 from Houston to Dallas) and I rented a car when I got there. Where I was going was basically never in anything like a city center. Having to or wanting to rent a car when you travel to somewhere does significantly lessen the potential train advantage of dropping you off in downtown if that's not where you need to be.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > Just observe the scale of your own airport's rental car center. Airports are usually at the outskirts of cities where land is abundant. Central train stations are just that, central. Would there really be enough free land in downtown Houston and Dallas to create huge new car-rental infrastructure?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cryptonector 3y ago
  > Every time I hear that argument I have to point out the millions of American short hop regional flights Those routes didn't need tens of $billions in land acquisition and construction costs.
  - icegreentea2 3y ago
    While airports do scale their capital costs somewhat differently (better?), airports are actually multi-billion dollar construction projects. Here's Dallas' 5 billion dollar airport expansion plan (https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/dallas-fort-worth/news/2023/05/16/-4-8b-dfw-airport-expansion-plan-includes-construction-of-6th-terminal- https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/dallas-fort-worth/news/2023...), and here's Houston's 1.3 billion dollar terminal expansion (https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/08/17/billion-dollar-budget-for-new-international-terminal-at-bush-intercontinental-airport-rising-again/ https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/08/17/billion-...)
ghaff 3y ago
On the one hand, the distance and population make this look potentially attractive. On the other hand, Houston is very spread out and even a lot of Dallas industry is in suburbs. So, even if you're going to downtown Dallas from Houston, you may be doing a relatively long drive to a suburban train station--at which point, is it really worth cutting out the 3-4 hour drive especially if you want a car at the other end?
- ktosobcy 3y ago
  Well, there is always the benefit of NOT having to drive and being able to do other things (reading) or just relaxing... Driving IS tiring...
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    There are fairly inexpensive luxury bus options for travel between all the major cities in Texas. These come with internet access, spacious accommodations, clean restrooms.
  - jakeinspace 3y ago
    The point is, Houston is virtually impossible to live in without a car (I experienced that for 6 months, not great). There would of course be a bus or light rail between downtown and/or the airport to this train terminal, but for those in a Houston suburb looking to visit a friend in a Dallas suburb, there would be easily 1-2 hours of driving involved. You just can’t get downtown from where most houstonians live by bus.
    - ktosobcy 3y ago
      Well, so because "us housing / cities care utterly broken then let's settle on not fixing any posible solution and making the situation less broken ;-) (I once went to Dallas and felt adventurous and opted not to rent a car - it was a hellish experience getting around outside of the provided office shuttle - going to the nearest target on foot was more than an hour walk and then on a train to the centre I felt treated like a homeless or some such - the ticket checker just kicked my foot to wake me up from the doze)
School-Cotton 3y ago
Maybe it “could”, but it won’t. The US has completely lost the ability to build large-scale infrastructure.
- throwaw1yyy 3y ago
  FL built a rail line in South Florida recently and if the US decides too, can make things happen
- unglaublich 3y ago
  The whole western world is now locked up in people protecting the value of their properties and real estate. Do _anything_ of significance, and you will get hordes of people that demand that YOU pay for a hypothetical 5% decrease in delusional fictional real estate value. Progress is grinding to a halt. We're economies broken by people who will not allow to take one step back to allow two steps forward.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    > We're economies broken by people who will not allow to take one step back to allow two steps forward. The core issue is that the people that are negatively impacted by the construction are not the same people that stand to benefit from the construction. They would take one step back in the short run without going two steps forward in the future. It's a promising route for high speed rail, so I wish them good luck. It's quite cheap to fly betweens these two cities though.
ashayh 3y ago
No it won't. Americans are too deluded by car culture to ever let that happen. You will see highways with 55 lanes each way, but you won't see an operational high speed train in the US. There are simply too many people opposed to any kind of real progress in this direction, and even the proponents of HSR or mass public transit have no shortage of excuses. Furthermore, HSR also requires some level of last mile connectivity by local mass public transit. There is none of that in places like Texas, and again the public imagination has not moved on from some kind of 1950s car culture utopia, thats about "freedom". In reality, cars are parked 90% of the time, and driven by tired, frustrated drivers in bumper to bumper traffic for the rest of the time. The reality is that 20% of Texans (also other cities/states) spend $1000 or more a month on car. In many areas in the US, cars are the number 2, sometimes number 1 expense. Here is a mass transit map of Berlin vs Houston: https://i.imgur.com/HwBGUcU.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HwBGUcU.jpg There is no HSR happening. Americans have dug a hole so deep with car culture and other Nimby delusions such as "what will happen to my home values", that there is no coming back from this.
- sm_1024 3y ago
  > There is no HSR happening. https://hsr.ca.gov/ https://hsr.ca.gov/ SF-LA high-speed rail
  - ashayh 3y ago
    Why not link to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail which states: " Since its inception in 2008, the Group has issued 18 letters and members have testified before Legislative and Congressional committees 15 times. In reviewing past letters and testimony, a consistent theme emerges: 1) project costs, schedules, and ridership estimates are uncertain and subject to significant risk of deteriorating, a typical experience for mega-projects; 2) the project is underfunded, and its financing is unstable, raising costs and making effective management difficult if not impossible; 3) more legislative oversight is needed. This letter reinforces the message, but with a sense of urgency over the ever-higher stakes.[6] " Also: "Per the 2023 Project Status Report, the authority indicated the Interim IOS will go into service before December 31, 2030, with a "risk factor" of three years (which runs until the end of 2033)." In the period between 2008-2023, several other countries (not just China) have started and completed many HSR projects.
whartung 3y ago
Well, if they do, knowing Texas, it’ll be a .45 caliber bullet train.
leishman 3y ago
Both Dallas and Houston are completely unwalkable, so you’d still need a car or Uber when you arrive.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Heh, how about they get Amtrack to be reliable first. Last I checked, the train between Dallas and Fort Worth is too unreliable to use for a job commute. ...Which is awful, because the commute into downtown Dallas is surely one of the worst on the planet. I have never seen such a concentration of angry drivers.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  FWIW, I found Amtrak between Boston and southern Rhode Island to be reliable enough for a daily commute (a few years ago at least).
  - afavour 3y ago
    Unfortunately there’s very little notion of nationwide quality for Amtrak. I’ve taken it between NYC and DC plenty of times and it’s always been great but I wouldn’t automatically extend that experience to any other line in the system.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I believe Amtrak owns their tracks on the Northeast Corridor which they don't in most of (all?) the rest of the country where they conflict with freight. Amtrak basically makes all of their money on the Northeast Corridor and loses it on most of their other routes.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    I didn't mean to imply Amtrack was unrelaible nationwide.
jt2190 3y ago
The question that Dallasites and Houstonians need to ask is whether they want to evolve their cities over the coming decades [1] toward a form that supports High Speed Rail. Primarily this would look like denser development around the rail hubs, plus infrastructure upgrades into and out of those locations. High-Speed Rail is a very long-term (probably multi-generation) commitment. (Edit: A typical mistake that people make when thinking about high-speed rail is to assume that the current form of a city is permanent. Dallas and Houston in particular are very pro-development, which means that in some ways it's actually easier to change the city form of those places.) [1] My father's last job before his retirement was long-term land use planning for Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART).
isykt 3y ago
About as likely as the Japanese giving up fish and rice.
jodrellblank 3y ago
There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station, and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. "The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA - "Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)" [it's not walkable] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 - How American urban transit is built misunderstanding the way transit needs to work to be successful, notably trying to build transit as a bandaid over car problems, but not making it regular, frequent, reliable, fast, convenient, instead plonking an isolated transit connection from nowhere to nowhere which runs once every couple of hours and then pointing to it as an example of how transit doesn't work in America - "America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnyeRlMsTgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnyeRlMsTgI - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ
- cryptonector 3y ago
  > - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ The Eastern seaboard of the U.S. absolutely has a) a very linear quality to it (from DC to Boston), b) density, and it's been so since the the early 19th century. Canada is huge, but its population lives along a very narrow latitude band, so it's linear (and low-density). Outside the Eastern seaboard the U.S. really is huge, with nothing like a linear arrangement of cities.
dylan604 3y ago
I've been hearing about a bullet train between Houston and Dallas for over 30 years. Guess what? Over the years, there have been plans for the train to complete the triangle to go from Houston -> Dallas -> Austin/San Antonio. Some people here are saying it's about car culture preventing this from happening. Maybe that's part of it, but it's also about land ownership and nobody wanting to sell their property in order to all for the tracks to be built. Imminent domain has been mentioned for over 30 years, but again, guess what. Edit: to add another Texas tall tale to go along with this bullet train. There was/is also another plan to widen/deepen the Trinity river to allow cargo ships to come to Dallas. There are a few bridges in the Dallas area that cross the Trinity that are way taller than what one would imagine from the worst 1000 year flood. They were built around the time of this dredging being a hot topic, so they were unnecessarily expensive. Some ideas just won't die
- cryptonector 3y ago
  Even with eminent domain the government has to pay fair market value compensation. In Texas rural land prices are $30k and up per-acre, going up quite a bit for more desirable land. The land between Dallas and Houston is fertile and valuable, and much of it is also oil country. Oil producers probably wouldn't mind ceding some land to a train project, but farmers and homesteaders absolutely would mind, and you can expect lawsuits for years and years. The land between San Antonio and Austin is more expensive since it's all already an urban corridor, so the train would have to track West, except that West isn't feasible because it's Hill Country, so it would have to track East, but East is also quite urban/suburban as well. The further East you go, the better the land is for farming, the more it's worth. The land between Houston and SA/Austin is quite valuable because, again, it's a long corridor of small towns with lots of very fertile land (all of it being East of I-35). The land between Austin and Dallas is drier -so less valuable- and fairly flat, but still there's a lot of towns between DFW and Austin. This is probably the cheapest land to acquire for this project. Just the land costs for this would be enormous. And conventional train tracks cost on the order of $1m/mile at least, with high-speed train tracks costing more. Because high-speed rail needs to be straighter and flatter, there will be more constraints on what land could be used, and geographic constraints will be more costly. On the plus side Texas is now willing to tax businesses more in order to tax residents less. That might lead to the state being willing to raise the funds for this project, but I guarantee you it's going to be extremely contentious.
dbg31415 3y ago
This has to be a scam. First thought is some company trying pocket a bunch of federal grant money to do “research,” or perhaps, trying to get somebody to buy their land. There is no way this gets built in Texas.
revscat 3y ago
No, it won’t. The laws are structured to systematically favor forcing people to purchase cars. The potential financial losses to the auto and petroleum interests will prevent any plan related to mass transit from ever moving beyond the planning stages, climate change and personal freedom be damned.
jordemort 3y ago
If there was ever a way to sell high speed rail in Texas, calling it a "bullet" train is it. If it actually gets built, I bet the train is painted to look like an actual bullet.

39 points by elorant 3y ago

I’ll believe it when I see it. Maybe the Texas legislature is taking notes on south Florida, an unlikely success story for regional travel in the US. But the thing about Florida is that most of it is a swamp that people don’t want to live on. That is not true of land in Texas. Without eminent domain, I don’t see how Texas will acquire the land necessary to make this project a reality.

throwaw1yyy 3y ago
There is wide support in FL for it from people on both sides of the aisles. The hang up was always the cost (not the environmental cost, likes the birds or whatever) and Brightline being privately owned meant zero hang ups FL is a forward looking state: it looks forward to different future than Cali dysfunction
jodrellblank 3y ago
How come there was no objection like this for all the land for the highways, highway expansion and surface car parks? Where did that land come from?

dangus 3y ago

I'll take this opportunity to address the rail haters' main point against high speed rail in America: the fact that we all need cars at our destinations, America is too big and spread out, etc. Every time I hear that argument I have to point out the millions of American short hop regional flights that are taken each year. Millions of people already use rideshares, taxis, and rent cars at their destinations. Just observe the scale of your own airport's rental car center. I think that high speed rail in Texas can sustain itself and be more economically and environmentally efficient almost solely on business travelers whose status quo involves driving between city centers and being paid for mileage. A business traveler between Dallas and Houston will bill their company for 240 miles. At IRS standard 65.5 cents per mile, that's $157 worth of total cost being A high speed train could probably be a profit-generating enterprise at half that ticket price, and businesses would pay a premium for it to save time over driving. Also, the business travelers can do work while on the train rather than focusing on driving. That cost and time savings can buy a lot of Uber rides and parking garage fees.

ghaff 3y ago
I'm not a rail hater. I typically take the train to NYC although that's because I hate driving into Manhattan and getting into the city from the NYC airports is awful. However, I used to travel to Houston all the time from New Orleans and I flew. That's more like a 5 hour drive (vs. 3-4 from Houston to Dallas) and I rented a car when I got there. Where I was going was basically never in anything like a city center. Having to or wanting to rent a car when you travel to somewhere does significantly lessen the potential train advantage of dropping you off in downtown if that's not where you need to be.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> Just observe the scale of your own airport's rental car center. Airports are usually at the outskirts of cities where land is abundant. Central train stations are just that, central. Would there really be enough free land in downtown Houston and Dallas to create huge new car-rental infrastructure?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cryptonector 3y ago
> Every time I hear that argument I have to point out the millions of American short hop regional flights Those routes didn't need tens of $billions in land acquisition and construction costs.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  While airports do scale their capital costs somewhat differently (better?), airports are actually multi-billion dollar construction projects. Here's Dallas' 5 billion dollar airport expansion plan (https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/dallas-fort-worth/news/2023/05/16/-4-8b-dfw-airport-expansion-plan-includes-construction-of-6th-terminal- https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/dallas-fort-worth/news/2023...), and here's Houston's 1.3 billion dollar terminal expansion (https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/08/17/billion-dollar-budget-for-new-international-terminal-at-bush-intercontinental-airport-rising-again/ https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/08/17/billion-...)

ghaff 3y ago

On the one hand, the distance and population make this look potentially attractive. On the other hand, Houston is very spread out and even a lot of Dallas industry is in suburbs. So, even if you're going to downtown Dallas from Houston, you may be doing a relatively long drive to a suburban train station--at which point, is it really worth cutting out the 3-4 hour drive especially if you want a car at the other end?

ktosobcy 3y ago
Well, there is always the benefit of NOT having to drive and being able to do other things (reading) or just relaxing... Driving IS tiring...
- cryptonector 3y ago
  There are fairly inexpensive luxury bus options for travel between all the major cities in Texas. These come with internet access, spacious accommodations, clean restrooms.
- jakeinspace 3y ago
  The point is, Houston is virtually impossible to live in without a car (I experienced that for 6 months, not great). There would of course be a bus or light rail between downtown and/or the airport to this train terminal, but for those in a Houston suburb looking to visit a friend in a Dallas suburb, there would be easily 1-2 hours of driving involved. You just can’t get downtown from where most houstonians live by bus.
  - ktosobcy 3y ago
    Well, so because "us housing / cities care utterly broken then let's settle on not fixing any posible solution and making the situation less broken ;-) (I once went to Dallas and felt adventurous and opted not to rent a car - it was a hellish experience getting around outside of the provided office shuttle - going to the nearest target on foot was more than an hour walk and then on a train to the centre I felt treated like a homeless or some such - the ticket checker just kicked my foot to wake me up from the doze)

School-Cotton 3y ago

Maybe it “could”, but it won’t. The US has completely lost the ability to build large-scale infrastructure.

throwaw1yyy 3y ago
FL built a rail line in South Florida recently and if the US decides too, can make things happen
unglaublich 3y ago
The whole western world is now locked up in people protecting the value of their properties and real estate. Do _anything_ of significance, and you will get hordes of people that demand that YOU pay for a hypothetical 5% decrease in delusional fictional real estate value. Progress is grinding to a halt. We're economies broken by people who will not allow to take one step back to allow two steps forward.
- cinntaile 3y ago
  > We're economies broken by people who will not allow to take one step back to allow two steps forward. The core issue is that the people that are negatively impacted by the construction are not the same people that stand to benefit from the construction. They would take one step back in the short run without going two steps forward in the future. It's a promising route for high speed rail, so I wish them good luck. It's quite cheap to fly betweens these two cities though.

ashayh 3y ago

No it won't. Americans are too deluded by car culture to ever let that happen. You will see highways with 55 lanes each way, but you won't see an operational high speed train in the US. There are simply too many people opposed to any kind of real progress in this direction, and even the proponents of HSR or mass public transit have no shortage of excuses. Furthermore, HSR also requires some level of last mile connectivity by local mass public transit. There is none of that in places like Texas, and again the public imagination has not moved on from some kind of 1950s car culture utopia, thats about "freedom". In reality, cars are parked 90% of the time, and driven by tired, frustrated drivers in bumper to bumper traffic for the rest of the time. The reality is that 20% of Texans (also other cities/states) spend $1000 or more a month on car. In many areas in the US, cars are the number 2, sometimes number 1 expense. Here is a mass transit map of Berlin vs Houston: https://i.imgur.com/HwBGUcU.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HwBGUcU.jpg There is no HSR happening. Americans have dug a hole so deep with car culture and other Nimby delusions such as "what will happen to my home values", that there is no coming back from this.

sm_1024 3y ago
> There is no HSR happening. https://hsr.ca.gov/ https://hsr.ca.gov/ SF-LA high-speed rail
- ashayh 3y ago
  Why not link to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail which states: " Since its inception in 2008, the Group has issued 18 letters and members have testified before Legislative and Congressional committees 15 times. In reviewing past letters and testimony, a consistent theme emerges: 1) project costs, schedules, and ridership estimates are uncertain and subject to significant risk of deteriorating, a typical experience for mega-projects; 2) the project is underfunded, and its financing is unstable, raising costs and making effective management difficult if not impossible; 3) more legislative oversight is needed. This letter reinforces the message, but with a sense of urgency over the ever-higher stakes.[6] " Also: "Per the 2023 Project Status Report, the authority indicated the Interim IOS will go into service before December 31, 2030, with a "risk factor" of three years (which runs until the end of 2033)." In the period between 2008-2023, several other countries (not just China) have started and completed many HSR projects.

whartung 3y ago

Well, if they do, knowing Texas, it’ll be a .45 caliber bullet train.

leishman 3y ago

Both Dallas and Houston are completely unwalkable, so you’d still need a car or Uber when you arrive.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Heh, how about they get Amtrack to be reliable first. Last I checked, the train between Dallas and Fort Worth is too unreliable to use for a job commute. ...Which is awful, because the commute into downtown Dallas is surely one of the worst on the planet. I have never seen such a concentration of angry drivers.

CoastalCoder 3y ago
FWIW, I found Amtrak between Boston and southern Rhode Island to be reliable enough for a daily commute (a few years ago at least).
- afavour 3y ago
  Unfortunately there’s very little notion of nationwide quality for Amtrak. I’ve taken it between NYC and DC plenty of times and it’s always been great but I wouldn’t automatically extend that experience to any other line in the system.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I believe Amtrak owns their tracks on the Northeast Corridor which they don't in most of (all?) the rest of the country where they conflict with freight. Amtrak basically makes all of their money on the Northeast Corridor and loses it on most of their other routes.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  I didn't mean to imply Amtrack was unrelaible nationwide.

jt2190 3y ago

The question that Dallasites and Houstonians need to ask is whether they want to evolve their cities over the coming decades [1] toward a form that supports High Speed Rail. Primarily this would look like denser development around the rail hubs, plus infrastructure upgrades into and out of those locations. High-Speed Rail is a very long-term (probably multi-generation) commitment. (Edit: A typical mistake that people make when thinking about high-speed rail is to assume that the current form of a city is permanent. Dallas and Houston in particular are very pro-development, which means that in some ways it's actually easier to change the city form of those places.) [1] My father's last job before his retirement was long-term land use planning for Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART).

isykt 3y ago

About as likely as the Japanese giving up fish and rice.

jodrellblank 3y ago

There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station, and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. "The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA - "Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)" [it's not walkable] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 - How American urban transit is built misunderstanding the way transit needs to work to be successful, notably trying to build transit as a bandaid over car problems, but not making it regular, frequent, reliable, fast, convenient, instead plonking an isolated transit connection from nowhere to nowhere which runs once every couple of hours and then pointing to it as an example of how transit doesn't work in America - "America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnyeRlMsTgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnyeRlMsTgI - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ

cryptonector 3y ago
> - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ The Eastern seaboard of the U.S. absolutely has a) a very linear quality to it (from DC to Boston), b) density, and it's been so since the the early 19th century. Canada is huge, but its population lives along a very narrow latitude band, so it's linear (and low-density). Outside the Eastern seaboard the U.S. really is huge, with nothing like a linear arrangement of cities.

dylan604 3y ago

I've been hearing about a bullet train between Houston and Dallas for over 30 years. Guess what? Over the years, there have been plans for the train to complete the triangle to go from Houston -> Dallas -> Austin/San Antonio. Some people here are saying it's about car culture preventing this from happening. Maybe that's part of it, but it's also about land ownership and nobody wanting to sell their property in order to all for the tracks to be built. Imminent domain has been mentioned for over 30 years, but again, guess what. Edit: to add another Texas tall tale to go along with this bullet train. There was/is also another plan to widen/deepen the Trinity river to allow cargo ships to come to Dallas. There are a few bridges in the Dallas area that cross the Trinity that are way taller than what one would imagine from the worst 1000 year flood. They were built around the time of this dredging being a hot topic, so they were unnecessarily expensive. Some ideas just won't die

cryptonector 3y ago
Even with eminent domain the government has to pay fair market value compensation. In Texas rural land prices are $30k and up per-acre, going up quite a bit for more desirable land. The land between Dallas and Houston is fertile and valuable, and much of it is also oil country. Oil producers probably wouldn't mind ceding some land to a train project, but farmers and homesteaders absolutely would mind, and you can expect lawsuits for years and years. The land between San Antonio and Austin is more expensive since it's all already an urban corridor, so the train would have to track West, except that West isn't feasible because it's Hill Country, so it would have to track East, but East is also quite urban/suburban as well. The further East you go, the better the land is for farming, the more it's worth. The land between Houston and SA/Austin is quite valuable because, again, it's a long corridor of small towns with lots of very fertile land (all of it being East of I-35). The land between Austin and Dallas is drier -so less valuable- and fairly flat, but still there's a lot of towns between DFW and Austin. This is probably the cheapest land to acquire for this project. Just the land costs for this would be enormous. And conventional train tracks cost on the order of $1m/mile at least, with high-speed train tracks costing more. Because high-speed rail needs to be straighter and flatter, there will be more constraints on what land could be used, and geographic constraints will be more costly. On the plus side Texas is now willing to tax businesses more in order to tax residents less. That might lead to the state being willing to raise the funds for this project, but I guarantee you it's going to be extremely contentious.

dbg31415 3y ago

This has to be a scam. First thought is some company trying pocket a bunch of federal grant money to do “research,” or perhaps, trying to get somebody to buy their land. There is no way this gets built in Texas.

revscat 3y ago

No, it won’t. The laws are structured to systematically favor forcing people to purchase cars. The potential financial losses to the auto and petroleum interests will prevent any plan related to mass transit from ever moving beyond the planning stages, climate change and personal freedom be damned.

jordemort 3y ago

If there was ever a way to sell high speed rail in Texas, calling it a "bullet" train is it. If it actually gets built, I bet the train is painted to look like an actual bullet.