6 ms·

Obama Unveils Plan to Fund High-Speed Passenger Rail

65 points by ph0rque 18y ago

tjake 18y ago
... That better have High-Speed Wifi!
rjurney 18y ago
Just to put this in perspective - we currently spend $12 billion a month in Iraq. For roughly that amount, one month's Iraq budget, we can have high speed rail. Pretty mind boggling.
- kirse 18y ago
  Just to put Iraq in perspective, the government has already spent or committed $12.8 trillion this year alone to hold off a deeper recession: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=armOzfkwtCA4&refer=worldwide http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=armO... As a taxpayer, I think I'd prefer if we hold off subsidizing useless infrastructure like trains when we already have cars, buses, and airplanes. Edit: Geez, this drive-by down voting is really getting out of hand lately.
  - omouse 18y ago
    I'd rather have trains move people than cars. One can hold many more people than the other and doesn't clog up the highways and most likely produces less pollution...
    - kirse 18y ago
      There is absolutely no benefit to taking a train instead of a bus. Name one. (And I'm not talking about subway vs. bus) Buses cost less, are equally as cramped, and take less time to arrive at their destination. 99% of people don't care about pollution when deciding to ride a train or bus. They're asking "how long will it take and how much will it cost?"
      - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
        You're comparing buses to current trains, which is a bit of a straw man, as we're talking about high-speed trains. Additionally, trains are nowhere near as cramped as buses, at least the ones I've ridden. They're considerably roomier in terms of the seats and the areas to walk around in, and often have food and beverage areas as well.
        kirse 18y ago
        Ok, you're correct on that point. Now here's what I want you to do... Go on to Amtrak.com and configure a trip for yourself. You'll notice that riding on Amtrak costs MORE than a plane ticket. For a round-trip from Philadelphia to Austin, TX it's $500. I can go on Southwest.com right now and book the exact same trip for the exact same price. The difference? With Amtrak you're riding in a train for 56 hours. Now tell me exactly how a high-speed train (one with advanced infrastructure) is going to be cheaper than Amtrak? Trains are a lose-lose compromise between buses and planes. They cost way more than buses and for the price range you might as well use air travel which saves 2 days of seat time.
        gcheong 18y ago
        Trains can have stops at smaller cities along the way making them more accessible to people who don't live in major cities. Case in point. My mother-in-law lives in Klamath Falls, OR. The planes costs more than the train if you do the regular train fare or about the same if you get the small sleeper. There are no direct flights from SF to KFalls, so that means I usually have to fly to Seattle or Portland and then transfer to a smaller commuter which can make trip time almost as long. With the train, I get on at 9pm, go to sleep and wake up in Klamath Falls the next morning.
        frossie 18y ago
        Did you read that article at all? First, there is no point looking at current prices, because it is a service running on relatively unsubsidised ifrastructure. The point here is to subsidise infrastructure. Secondly and even more importantly, yeah dude, if I want to go Paris to Shanghai I am better off flying than taking a train. Does that mean there is no point in building a high speed rail network in France? It's not Philadelphia to Austin that is the aim here, it is journeys at the 300 mile sweetspot where a high speed train is a more optimal solution than either car or plane. I am really sorry but I am starting to think that anybody who doesn't see the benefits of a high-speed rail network has simply not been on one. And that's even before you throw in the environmental cost.
  - gjm11 18y ago
    You'd get less drive-by downvoting if you didn't say stupid things. Who knows, you might get less if you didn't keep complaining about it. (Trains can be much faster than buses, carry much bigger loads, and use less fuel to do so. They are not useless. If the trains you've got in the US at the moment seem useless, that would be because they've been very poorly invested in over the last several decades. Oh, and that $12.8 trillion, while it's certainly a terrifyingly large figure, is not directly comparable with what's being spent in Iraq, e.g. because much of it is not spending but guarantees of the form "if institution X collapses, you'll get back at least the first $Y it owes you", and much of the rest is loans. Even in the present economic climate, what you lend you're quite likely to get back, not to mention that you get paid interest on it while it's lent.)
  - jobeirne 18y ago
    I'm with you. We should be talking about knocking out our incredulous debt before we even think of expanding infrastructure.
- chadmalik 18y ago
  And just imagine the infrastructure we could have had for the cost of the Iraq war + the bank bailouts! Anyway one thing I'd like to mention that never gets highlighted is that buses are BY FAR the cheapest public transportation solution. Its not sexy but the good old fashioned bus is great since it can use the road infrastructure already built whereas trains need right of way and a lot of construction before they can be used.
  - jcdreads 18y ago
    You're right that new bus routes have a very low marginal cost, and that buses move more people per transportation dollar than other forms of public transportation, but without expensive dedicated lanes they are certain to be slower than cars, and therefore most otherwise merry takers of public transportation avoid using them. Another unfortunate problem with buses is that changing the bus route is pretty much trivially easy, with the consequence that they do change an awful lot (at least here in Boston), which means that buses generally provide really unreliable transportation. Montreal has a great bus system, iirc. Dedicated roads, dedicated, clean, underground tunnels. Probably super expensive. Alas.
  - omouse 18y ago
    If you're going to talk about buses you have to distinguish between intercity travel and innercity travel.
    - briansmith 18y ago
      I used to travel by bus instead of train all the time when I was in Thailand because the bus was always faster and cheaper than the trains. The only way trains are better is if they are much faster than buses.
      - omouse 18y ago
        Which is what we're talking about here. High speed trains. It's like half the people commenting here haven't read the article or something.
asdf333 18y ago
i am about as pro-green as it gets. However, I am really uncertain about whether passenger trains are a good idea. In most countries they are subsidized. the upkeep costs are high...the US is a very geographically sparse place... I'd much rather have them spend money on alternative energy, electric cars and funding startups at an arms length by investing in VC firms. (or running an independent VC arm)
- chadmalik 18y ago
  Doesn't it seem like having a high speed train network that connects the major metro areas is at least somewhat of a good idea? This is a good hedge against peak oil since trains can be powered by electricity. Also, arguably if the trains are used to move goods they can get trucks off the road and really decrease road maintenance costs. If you look into the wear and tear vehicles make on pavement, each extra pound is exponentially more damage. Trucking companies actually are heavily subsidized by the road infrastructure but nobody notices it ;) I do wonder if we need high speed trains. Regular trains might be a better long term bet.
  - thingie 18y ago
    Actually, railways in USA already has much higher portion in freight transport than in EU (40% to 10%). It is not that big surprise, as big parts of the rail system are almost freight-only. High speed rail might work to connect nearby metro areas, but almost certainly, trains across half or whole US will not work. It's simply too far away, and it wouldn't be any competition to airplanes. Even EU high speed rail are mostly, in their current state, few scattered islands connecting large cities within a single country.
    - joeyo 18y ago
      > ... big parts of the rail system are almost freight-only. Rail can be a very cheap way to move freight. Slower than truck, sure. But quite inexpensive. I'd love to see more rail freight. The problem however is that in many parts of the country the same lines are shared by both passengers and freight. This means that for starters those lines are not going to be suitable for high speed passenger rail anyway. But beyond that, Amtrak gets second priority on those lines. This is one of the reasons for the frustrating delays that rail travel in the US always seems to have.
donw 18y ago
Is it bad that I was thinking that Obama had gotten into Ruby? I really need to get out more...
- aswanson 18y ago
  Aye, I thought the Engine Yard was up for a TARP injection.
miked 18y ago
What does this have to do with software development or startups?
- triplefox 18y ago
  Make a high-speed train startup?
- davidw 18y ago
  You're supposed to just flag it and move on. To another site that takes banishing politics discussions seriously?
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    "Economics of the Laffer curve and how it relates to taxation" -> flagged "Obama adminstration installs Apache servers" or some such -> not flagged That's what I love so much about standards. Everybody has them.
    - davidw 18y ago
      I flag pretty much everything that even remotely smacks of politics, and most economics, no matter which side it comes from or how much I agree with it.
      - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
        I know you do. I've been watching. I just enjoy watching the double-standards people employ. For example, in this discussion I'd love to see somebody bring up the point that passenger rail in the U.S. is a political idea and not a practical business idea -- take a look at Amtrak pricing. But by actually diving into the business side of the article, they'd call the resulting discussion political! I think "political" just means "stuff I don't agree with that has some sort of tangential relation to politics"
yish 18y ago
Like everything, its all about tradeoffs: upfront costs, ongoing costs vs profit, time, environmental impact, convenience and capacity. All the transportation systems we should invest in (and all of them are somewhat subsidized by the government) should be the ideal balance of these tradeoffs for that particular distance range. I believe there is a sweet spot in travel distance where high speed trains are the optimal solution over cars in the smaller distance range and planes in the longer distance range. Few would think to travel from LA to NY on a train but when you are talking about LA to SF, it makes a lot of sense. Time and destination wise it's more convenient, the environmental impact is less, frees up plane capacity at LAX and SFO for long distance flights, ongoing costs are similar, and the only question remaining is do these benefits outweigh the very large upfront cost? Would love to see how much these costs compare (a new high speed train route vs a hypothetical new airport + enough planes to service the route)
- endtime 18y ago
  The sweet spot absolutely exists. When I went to school in DC, and wanted to go home to north NJ, taking Amtrak was about the same cost as a flight, about the same time (because of airport overhead, and because the airport was further away than the train station), and more comfortable.
gills 18y ago
Taste the Rainbow
BerislavLopac 18y ago
I just did a quick text search both on the article and here in the comments, and I can't believe that no one has mentioned maglev? Please, Barack -- don't build your plain old wheel-based trains, no matter how fast; skip directly into 22nd century and mak a nationwide network of the fastest, most efficient and safest trains known to man.
- qazwsxedc 18y ago
  Please don't jump on the bandwagon of the obsolete maglev technology - we need to put this money toward research into teleporters
jacoblyles 18y ago
Since no discussion is complete if it is one-sided, I offer an alternative perspective: (PDF link) http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-625.pdf http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-625.pdf "Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110- to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take fewcars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future. Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by a mere 0.7 to1.5 percent—but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions. These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States? As megaprojects—the California high-speed rail is projected to cost $33 to $37 billion—high-speed rail plans pose serious risks for taxpayers. Costs of recent rail projects in Denver and Seattle are running 60 to 100 percent above projections. Once construction begins, politicians will feel obligated to throw good taxpayers’ money after bad. Once projects are completed, most plans call for them to be turned over to private companies that will keep any operationalprofits, while taxpayerswill remain vulnerable if the trains lose money. In short, high-speed rail proposals are high cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits." And with that, I'm going to get a pseudonym. Hacker News users aren't just random people on the internet, they're people I'd like to work with someday. And I usually avoid discussing contentious political issues with my colleagues unless they bring it up first and seem thick-skinned. If there's going to be politics on hacker news, then I, as me, must go.
- sfk 18y ago
  "These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?" The author who wrote that has in all likelihood never traveled by train in Europe. At least in Germany, high speed trains are a huge success and often overcrowded when I use them.
systemtrigger 18y ago
Map of today's Amtrak network: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Amtrak_network_2007.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Amtrak_ne...
psb217 18y ago
This is the wrong way to go. I would guess that high-speed trains will only reduce people's reliance on airplanes, which are themselves a form of mass-transit. This particular change should be easy to effect, as many casual travelers will be swayed by the (hopefully) greater convenience of train travel versus the airport hassle. However, many who are over-reliant on their cars will continue to be so, as they are less likely to be the people traveling frequently by plane. Also, people will have no incentive to reduce their car dependence so long as they still have to drive everyday for work/groceries/practically everything, unless they are lucky enough to already live in one of the rare (at least in the USA) cities with public transportation that could be rationally argued as superior to individual cars. So, I would argue that massive investment in intra-city public transport infrastructure would have a more significantly positive long-term effect, as its availability would be relevant to more people, and has a the potential to cause a significantly larger reduction in the number of miles driven per person in the USA. Unfortunately, the negative stigma that seems to linger over public transport in many parts of this country would likely retard these benefits. The real utility of the simple bus systems that would be a reasonable first step, as opposed to metros/subways, would not become apparent until the use of mass-transit reached a critical mass, at which the density of cars on the road would be reduced to a point allowing buses to travel quickly. Though, the importance of reaching this critical mass, which creates a sort of chicken<->egg problem, could be reduced by dedicated bus lanes, as some others have already mentioned.

65 points by ph0rque 18y ago

tjake 18y ago

... That better have High-Speed Wifi!

Just to put this in perspective - we currently spend $12 billion a month in Iraq. For roughly that amount, one month's Iraq budget, we can have high speed rail. Pretty mind boggling.

kirse 18y ago
Just to put Iraq in perspective, the government has already spent or committed $12.8 trillion this year alone to hold off a deeper recession: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=armOzfkwtCA4&refer=worldwide http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=armO... As a taxpayer, I think I'd prefer if we hold off subsidizing useless infrastructure like trains when we already have cars, buses, and airplanes. Edit: Geez, this drive-by down voting is really getting out of hand lately.
- omouse 18y ago
  I'd rather have trains move people than cars. One can hold many more people than the other and doesn't clog up the highways and most likely produces less pollution...
  - kirse 18y ago
    There is absolutely no benefit to taking a train instead of a bus. Name one. (And I'm not talking about subway vs. bus) Buses cost less, are equally as cramped, and take less time to arrive at their destination. 99% of people don't care about pollution when deciding to ride a train or bus. They're asking "how long will it take and how much will it cost?"
    - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
      You're comparing buses to current trains, which is a bit of a straw man, as we're talking about high-speed trains. Additionally, trains are nowhere near as cramped as buses, at least the ones I've ridden. They're considerably roomier in terms of the seats and the areas to walk around in, and often have food and beverage areas as well.
      - kirse 18y ago
        Ok, you're correct on that point. Now here's what I want you to do... Go on to Amtrak.com and configure a trip for yourself. You'll notice that riding on Amtrak costs MORE than a plane ticket. For a round-trip from Philadelphia to Austin, TX it's $500. I can go on Southwest.com right now and book the exact same trip for the exact same price. The difference? With Amtrak you're riding in a train for 56 hours. Now tell me exactly how a high-speed train (one with advanced infrastructure) is going to be cheaper than Amtrak? Trains are a lose-lose compromise between buses and planes. They cost way more than buses and for the price range you might as well use air travel which saves 2 days of seat time.
        gcheong 18y ago
        Trains can have stops at smaller cities along the way making them more accessible to people who don't live in major cities. Case in point. My mother-in-law lives in Klamath Falls, OR. The planes costs more than the train if you do the regular train fare or about the same if you get the small sleeper. There are no direct flights from SF to KFalls, so that means I usually have to fly to Seattle or Portland and then transfer to a smaller commuter which can make trip time almost as long. With the train, I get on at 9pm, go to sleep and wake up in Klamath Falls the next morning.
        frossie 18y ago
        Did you read that article at all? First, there is no point looking at current prices, because it is a service running on relatively unsubsidised ifrastructure. The point here is to subsidise infrastructure. Secondly and even more importantly, yeah dude, if I want to go Paris to Shanghai I am better off flying than taking a train. Does that mean there is no point in building a high speed rail network in France? It's not Philadelphia to Austin that is the aim here, it is journeys at the 300 mile sweetspot where a high speed train is a more optimal solution than either car or plane. I am really sorry but I am starting to think that anybody who doesn't see the benefits of a high-speed rail network has simply not been on one. And that's even before you throw in the environmental cost.
- gjm11 18y ago
  You'd get less drive-by downvoting if you didn't say stupid things. Who knows, you might get less if you didn't keep complaining about it. (Trains can be much faster than buses, carry much bigger loads, and use less fuel to do so. They are not useless. If the trains you've got in the US at the moment seem useless, that would be because they've been very poorly invested in over the last several decades. Oh, and that $12.8 trillion, while it's certainly a terrifyingly large figure, is not directly comparable with what's being spent in Iraq, e.g. because much of it is not spending but guarantees of the form "if institution X collapses, you'll get back at least the first $Y it owes you", and much of the rest is loans. Even in the present economic climate, what you lend you're quite likely to get back, not to mention that you get paid interest on it while it's lent.)
- jobeirne 18y ago
  I'm with you. We should be talking about knocking out our incredulous debt before we even think of expanding infrastructure.
chadmalik 18y ago
And just imagine the infrastructure we could have had for the cost of the Iraq war + the bank bailouts! Anyway one thing I'd like to mention that never gets highlighted is that buses are BY FAR the cheapest public transportation solution. Its not sexy but the good old fashioned bus is great since it can use the road infrastructure already built whereas trains need right of way and a lot of construction before they can be used.
- jcdreads 18y ago
  You're right that new bus routes have a very low marginal cost, and that buses move more people per transportation dollar than other forms of public transportation, but without expensive dedicated lanes they are certain to be slower than cars, and therefore most otherwise merry takers of public transportation avoid using them. Another unfortunate problem with buses is that changing the bus route is pretty much trivially easy, with the consequence that they do change an awful lot (at least here in Boston), which means that buses generally provide really unreliable transportation. Montreal has a great bus system, iirc. Dedicated roads, dedicated, clean, underground tunnels. Probably super expensive. Alas.
- omouse 18y ago
  If you're going to talk about buses you have to distinguish between intercity travel and innercity travel.
  - briansmith 18y ago
    I used to travel by bus instead of train all the time when I was in Thailand because the bus was always faster and cheaper than the trains. The only way trains are better is if they are much faster than buses.
    - omouse 18y ago
      Which is what we're talking about here. High speed trains. It's like half the people commenting here haven't read the article or something.

asdf333 18y ago

i am about as pro-green as it gets. However, I am really uncertain about whether passenger trains are a good idea. In most countries they are subsidized. the upkeep costs are high...the US is a very geographically sparse place... I'd much rather have them spend money on alternative energy, electric cars and funding startups at an arms length by investing in VC firms. (or running an independent VC arm)

chadmalik 18y ago
Doesn't it seem like having a high speed train network that connects the major metro areas is at least somewhat of a good idea? This is a good hedge against peak oil since trains can be powered by electricity. Also, arguably if the trains are used to move goods they can get trucks off the road and really decrease road maintenance costs. If you look into the wear and tear vehicles make on pavement, each extra pound is exponentially more damage. Trucking companies actually are heavily subsidized by the road infrastructure but nobody notices it ;) I do wonder if we need high speed trains. Regular trains might be a better long term bet.
- thingie 18y ago
  Actually, railways in USA already has much higher portion in freight transport than in EU (40% to 10%). It is not that big surprise, as big parts of the rail system are almost freight-only. High speed rail might work to connect nearby metro areas, but almost certainly, trains across half or whole US will not work. It's simply too far away, and it wouldn't be any competition to airplanes. Even EU high speed rail are mostly, in their current state, few scattered islands connecting large cities within a single country.
  - joeyo 18y ago
    > ... big parts of the rail system are almost freight-only. Rail can be a very cheap way to move freight. Slower than truck, sure. But quite inexpensive. I'd love to see more rail freight. The problem however is that in many parts of the country the same lines are shared by both passengers and freight. This means that for starters those lines are not going to be suitable for high speed passenger rail anyway. But beyond that, Amtrak gets second priority on those lines. This is one of the reasons for the frustrating delays that rail travel in the US always seems to have.

donw 18y ago

Is it bad that I was thinking that Obama had gotten into Ruby? I really need to get out more...

aswanson 18y ago
Aye, I thought the Engine Yard was up for a TARP injection.

miked 18y ago

What does this have to do with software development or startups?

triplefox 18y ago
Make a high-speed train startup?
davidw 18y ago
You're supposed to just flag it and move on. To another site that takes banishing politics discussions seriously?
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  "Economics of the Laffer curve and how it relates to taxation" -> flagged "Obama adminstration installs Apache servers" or some such -> not flagged That's what I love so much about standards. Everybody has them.
  - davidw 18y ago
    I flag pretty much everything that even remotely smacks of politics, and most economics, no matter which side it comes from or how much I agree with it.
    - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
      I know you do. I've been watching. I just enjoy watching the double-standards people employ. For example, in this discussion I'd love to see somebody bring up the point that passenger rail in the U.S. is a political idea and not a practical business idea -- take a look at Amtrak pricing. But by actually diving into the business side of the article, they'd call the resulting discussion political! I think "political" just means "stuff I don't agree with that has some sort of tangential relation to politics"

yish 18y ago

Like everything, its all about tradeoffs: upfront costs, ongoing costs vs profit, time, environmental impact, convenience and capacity. All the transportation systems we should invest in (and all of them are somewhat subsidized by the government) should be the ideal balance of these tradeoffs for that particular distance range. I believe there is a sweet spot in travel distance where high speed trains are the optimal solution over cars in the smaller distance range and planes in the longer distance range. Few would think to travel from LA to NY on a train but when you are talking about LA to SF, it makes a lot of sense. Time and destination wise it's more convenient, the environmental impact is less, frees up plane capacity at LAX and SFO for long distance flights, ongoing costs are similar, and the only question remaining is do these benefits outweigh the very large upfront cost? Would love to see how much these costs compare (a new high speed train route vs a hypothetical new airport + enough planes to service the route)

endtime 18y ago
The sweet spot absolutely exists. When I went to school in DC, and wanted to go home to north NJ, taking Amtrak was about the same cost as a flight, about the same time (because of airport overhead, and because the airport was further away than the train station), and more comfortable.

gills 18y ago

Taste the Rainbow

BerislavLopac 18y ago

I just did a quick text search both on the article and here in the comments, and I can't believe that no one has mentioned maglev? Please, Barack -- don't build your plain old wheel-based trains, no matter how fast; skip directly into 22nd century and mak a nationwide network of the fastest, most efficient and safest trains known to man.

qazwsxedc 18y ago
Please don't jump on the bandwagon of the obsolete maglev technology - we need to put this money toward research into teleporters

jacoblyles 18y ago

Since no discussion is complete if it is one-sided, I offer an alternative perspective: (PDF link) http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-625.pdf http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-625.pdf "Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110- to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take fewcars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future. Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by a mere 0.7 to1.5 percent—but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions. These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States? As megaprojects—the California high-speed rail is projected to cost $33 to $37 billion—high-speed rail plans pose serious risks for taxpayers. Costs of recent rail projects in Denver and Seattle are running 60 to 100 percent above projections. Once construction begins, politicians will feel obligated to throw good taxpayers’ money after bad. Once projects are completed, most plans call for them to be turned over to private companies that will keep any operationalprofits, while taxpayerswill remain vulnerable if the trains lose money. In short, high-speed rail proposals are high cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits." And with that, I'm going to get a pseudonym. Hacker News users aren't just random people on the internet, they're people I'd like to work with someday. And I usually avoid discussing contentious political issues with my colleagues unless they bring it up first and seem thick-skinned. If there's going to be politics on hacker news, then I, as me, must go.

sfk 18y ago
"These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?" The author who wrote that has in all likelihood never traveled by train in Europe. At least in Germany, high speed trains are a huge success and often overcrowded when I use them.

systemtrigger 18y ago

Map of today's Amtrak network: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Amtrak_network_2007.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Amtrak_ne...

psb217 18y ago

This is the wrong way to go. I would guess that high-speed trains will only reduce people's reliance on airplanes, which are themselves a form of mass-transit. This particular change should be easy to effect, as many casual travelers will be swayed by the (hopefully) greater convenience of train travel versus the airport hassle. However, many who are over-reliant on their cars will continue to be so, as they are less likely to be the people traveling frequently by plane. Also, people will have no incentive to reduce their car dependence so long as they still have to drive everyday for work/groceries/practically everything, unless they are lucky enough to already live in one of the rare (at least in the USA) cities with public transportation that could be rationally argued as superior to individual cars. So, I would argue that massive investment in intra-city public transport infrastructure would have a more significantly positive long-term effect, as its availability would be relevant to more people, and has a the potential to cause a significantly larger reduction in the number of miles driven per person in the USA. Unfortunately, the negative stigma that seems to linger over public transport in many parts of this country would likely retard these benefits. The real utility of the simple bus systems that would be a reasonable first step, as opposed to metros/subways, would not become apparent until the use of mass-transit reached a critical mass, at which the density of cars on the road would be reduced to a point allowing buses to travel quickly. Though, the importance of reaching this critical mass, which creates a sort of chicken<->egg problem, could be reduced by dedicated bus lanes, as some others have already mentioned.