3 ms·

This is a little ridiculous. High-speed rail in the United States will never be feasible on a country-wide scale. It's just not necessary or logical. 14 hours

This is a little ridiculous. High-speed rail in the United States will never be feasible on a country-wide scale. It's just not necessary or logical. 14 hours across the country—or even 8 hours at nearly twice the viable speed—will never match the speed or efficiency of air travel. High speed rail can compete in the regional corridors where it makes sense. And it should. But the United States is huge. It's not Europe. We shouldn't expect this or desire it.

rayiner 14y ago
There's two physical factors working against air travel here: 1) it's much less cost-effective to make a flight comfortable, in terms of leg room, food, space to walk around, than a train trip; this difference only gets bigger as liquid fuel prices go up; 2) as a practical matter you can't build airports in the heart of urban centers. If there was a 14 hour train between NYC and LA, with the leg room and amenities of existing Amtrak trains, I think it would give air travel a run for its money. Taking a cab to LaGuardia takes about half an hour from Manhattan, and it's like a $40 cab ride. Another half an hour in LA, probably $50+ cab ride. Add at least an hour at the airport for each scenario, plus the 4-5 hours of actual travel time, and you're looking at an 8 hour trip. Would you rather have 8 hours of cab -> airport -> airplane -> airport -> cab, or 14 hours just walking from a downtown train station, onto a train, and out of another downtown train station? Would you rather spend 5 hours crammed into an economy class seat, or 14 hours in an Amtrak train with a ton of leg room, where you can get up, go to the snack car, etc?
- brc 14y ago
  On your point (1) : making a flight comfortable is just a case of paying more money for bigger seats and better food. However, people are extremely price-sensitive about travel, and will eagerly give up comfort for price savings. You can't argue against this : the market bears it out. A train service wanting to compete will reduce seat size and service to something approximating what air travel does now.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Bigger seats (more leg room) and better food costs weight. Weight is a much bigger problem for air travel than it is for train travel. It's just physics.
    - brc 14y ago
      Actually, bigger seats reduce weight because it reduces the density of people (and luggage) that the plane carries. It's a capacity issue. A plane can carry a fixed maximum amount of people, the same as a train. Finding the economic load for any transport solution is a function of what people are prepared to pay plus the fixed and variable costs for operation. So while weight is part of it, that's only as it pertains to the maximum lift of a plane. Weight isn't as important to a train, but a train still has limits to the amount of people and luggage it can carry. Even ferries have different price/class levels, some using airplane seats, some allowing cabins. This is totally dependent on what the market pays over anything else.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        I haven't sat down and done the math, but I'd imagine that if you compared the energy cost of counteracting lift induced drag, it would account for a larger portion of the operating cost of an airplane than the energy cost of counteracting rolling resistance does for a train. Assuming that is the case, it's less important for trains to minimize weight per passenger than it is for airplanes to do so, and space/comfort is directly related to weight per passenger.
- phon 14y ago
  This gets even more attractive when you factor in the possibility of taking an overnight train and booking a sleeper berth. When I worked in Beijing, trips to Shanghai were greatly improved by booking sleeper berths and catching a night express trains out and back. The entire experience was generally extremely low stress and utterly reliable.
- jzwinck 14y ago
  I want to agree with you, but as a practical matter, Amtrak currently offers service from NYC to Montreal that takes about 11 hours. Instead of offering it overnight, when it would add value by allowing passengers to sleep during most of their journey (and thus reduce their perceived travel time to less than that of a plane), they offer the service only during the day, in both directions! So you spent literally the entire day on the train. I would take a 14-hour train across the country, but not if it runs from 9 AM to 11 PM. And it would, because all those people in the middle don't want to have to join the train at their regional station in the middle of the night.
- notJim 14y ago
  I'd take the 5 hours of moderate discomfort, because I only get 2-3 weeks of vacation, and I'd rather not burn basically 2-4 days of my vacation on transit. Not only that, but the plane is likely also much cheaper, and I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on greater comfort for a few hours.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Your day isn't any less shot with 8 hours in the airport and on a plane than with 14 hours on a train.
    - calinet6 14y ago
      It absolutely is. It's 6 hours less shot to be exact.
- calinet6 14y ago
  1) Comfort is relatively speaking entirely irrelevant to the short air trips within the US. 2) As a practical matter, you don't need to. It takes you 30 extra minutes to get from the outskirts of cities to the centers, versus an extra 8 hours for train travel to get you to the city center. Perspective. Sure, you have some good points. Trains might have something for overnight trips with beds. But that's only a fraction of the market, and frankly, only for the West-to-East direction where redeye flights are most prevalent due to the time zone loss. Going East-to-West, the time advantage is ridiculously good: get on a plane in the morning in NYC and arrive in the morning in LA. You just can't beat that.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    > 1) Comfort is relatively speaking entirely irrelevant to the short air trips within the US. It's not. There is a reason Amtrak is absolutely destroying air travel in the Northeast corridor, especially among business travelers. I can get work done on a NYC to DC train trip. I can't get any work done on the corresponding airplane trip, between the tight spaces, the cabin pressure changes, etc. > 2) As a practical matter, you don't need to. It takes you 30 extra minutes to get from the outskirts of cities to the centers, versus an extra 8 hours for train travel to get you to the city center. Perspective. But not all trips are NYC to LA. The shorter the distance, the more time spent getting from an airport into the city impacts the overall travel time. HSR would get you from downtown NYC to downtown DC in 95 minutes. Getting from downtown to LaGuardia is 30 minutes and from Reagan to downtown is another 15 minutes best case, possibly a lot more with weekday traffic. More importantly to a business traveler, that's 45-60 minutes they're probably not getting any work done, while the train traveler is getting work done the extra 25 minutes the train is actually traveling versus the flight. HSR is supposed to do Boston to DC in 3 hours, versus 90 minutes for a plane trip. Add in airport time and time spent in the airport, the total travel time is probably a wash, but again much of the travel time for air travel is cabbing and waiting in line at the airport during which you can't get any work done. So the HSR still wins. DC to Boston is about 450 miles. There are a lot of major North American cities within ~500 miles of each other. E.g. Chicago to Toronto, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Milwaukee, etc. There's tens of millions of people in a ~500 mile radius of Chicago, and HSR would beat air travel for those trips.

rayiner 14y ago

There's two physical factors working against air travel here: 1) it's much less cost-effective to make a flight comfortable, in terms of leg room, food, space to walk around, than a train trip; this difference only gets bigger as liquid fuel prices go up; 2) as a practical matter you can't build airports in the heart of urban centers. If there was a 14 hour train between NYC and LA, with the leg room and amenities of existing Amtrak trains, I think it would give air travel a run for its money. Taking a cab to LaGuardia takes about half an hour from Manhattan, and it's like a $40 cab ride. Another half an hour in LA, probably $50+ cab ride. Add at least an hour at the airport for each scenario, plus the 4-5 hours of actual travel time, and you're looking at an 8 hour trip. Would you rather have 8 hours of cab -> airport -> airplane -> airport -> cab, or 14 hours just walking from a downtown train station, onto a train, and out of another downtown train station? Would you rather spend 5 hours crammed into an economy class seat, or 14 hours in an Amtrak train with a ton of leg room, where you can get up, go to the snack car, etc?

brc 14y ago
On your point (1) : making a flight comfortable is just a case of paying more money for bigger seats and better food. However, people are extremely price-sensitive about travel, and will eagerly give up comfort for price savings. You can't argue against this : the market bears it out. A train service wanting to compete will reduce seat size and service to something approximating what air travel does now.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Bigger seats (more leg room) and better food costs weight. Weight is a much bigger problem for air travel than it is for train travel. It's just physics.
  - brc 14y ago
    Actually, bigger seats reduce weight because it reduces the density of people (and luggage) that the plane carries. It's a capacity issue. A plane can carry a fixed maximum amount of people, the same as a train. Finding the economic load for any transport solution is a function of what people are prepared to pay plus the fixed and variable costs for operation. So while weight is part of it, that's only as it pertains to the maximum lift of a plane. Weight isn't as important to a train, but a train still has limits to the amount of people and luggage it can carry. Even ferries have different price/class levels, some using airplane seats, some allowing cabins. This is totally dependent on what the market pays over anything else.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      I haven't sat down and done the math, but I'd imagine that if you compared the energy cost of counteracting lift induced drag, it would account for a larger portion of the operating cost of an airplane than the energy cost of counteracting rolling resistance does for a train. Assuming that is the case, it's less important for trains to minimize weight per passenger than it is for airplanes to do so, and space/comfort is directly related to weight per passenger.
phon 14y ago
This gets even more attractive when you factor in the possibility of taking an overnight train and booking a sleeper berth. When I worked in Beijing, trips to Shanghai were greatly improved by booking sleeper berths and catching a night express trains out and back. The entire experience was generally extremely low stress and utterly reliable.
jzwinck 14y ago
I want to agree with you, but as a practical matter, Amtrak currently offers service from NYC to Montreal that takes about 11 hours. Instead of offering it overnight, when it would add value by allowing passengers to sleep during most of their journey (and thus reduce their perceived travel time to less than that of a plane), they offer the service only during the day, in both directions! So you spent literally the entire day on the train. I would take a 14-hour train across the country, but not if it runs from 9 AM to 11 PM. And it would, because all those people in the middle don't want to have to join the train at their regional station in the middle of the night.
notJim 14y ago
I'd take the 5 hours of moderate discomfort, because I only get 2-3 weeks of vacation, and I'd rather not burn basically 2-4 days of my vacation on transit. Not only that, but the plane is likely also much cheaper, and I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on greater comfort for a few hours.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Your day isn't any less shot with 8 hours in the airport and on a plane than with 14 hours on a train.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    It absolutely is. It's 6 hours less shot to be exact.
calinet6 14y ago
1) Comfort is relatively speaking entirely irrelevant to the short air trips within the US. 2) As a practical matter, you don't need to. It takes you 30 extra minutes to get from the outskirts of cities to the centers, versus an extra 8 hours for train travel to get you to the city center. Perspective. Sure, you have some good points. Trains might have something for overnight trips with beds. But that's only a fraction of the market, and frankly, only for the West-to-East direction where redeye flights are most prevalent due to the time zone loss. Going East-to-West, the time advantage is ridiculously good: get on a plane in the morning in NYC and arrive in the morning in LA. You just can't beat that.
- rayiner 14y ago
  > 1) Comfort is relatively speaking entirely irrelevant to the short air trips within the US. It's not. There is a reason Amtrak is absolutely destroying air travel in the Northeast corridor, especially among business travelers. I can get work done on a NYC to DC train trip. I can't get any work done on the corresponding airplane trip, between the tight spaces, the cabin pressure changes, etc. > 2) As a practical matter, you don't need to. It takes you 30 extra minutes to get from the outskirts of cities to the centers, versus an extra 8 hours for train travel to get you to the city center. Perspective. But not all trips are NYC to LA. The shorter the distance, the more time spent getting from an airport into the city impacts the overall travel time. HSR would get you from downtown NYC to downtown DC in 95 minutes. Getting from downtown to LaGuardia is 30 minutes and from Reagan to downtown is another 15 minutes best case, possibly a lot more with weekday traffic. More importantly to a business traveler, that's 45-60 minutes they're probably not getting any work done, while the train traveler is getting work done the extra 25 minutes the train is actually traveling versus the flight. HSR is supposed to do Boston to DC in 3 hours, versus 90 minutes for a plane trip. Add in airport time and time spent in the airport, the total travel time is probably a wash, but again much of the travel time for air travel is cabbing and waiting in line at the airport during which you can't get any work done. So the HSR still wins. DC to Boston is about 450 miles. There are a lot of major North American cities within ~500 miles of each other. E.g. Chicago to Toronto, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Milwaukee, etc. There's tens of millions of people in a ~500 mile radius of Chicago, and HSR would beat air travel for those trips.