7 ms·

The White House's Vision for High Speed Rail

32 points by iamwil 17y ago

tptacek 17y ago
There was a segment on NPR about this last weekend, centering on a husband/wife couple that lived in Belgium and commuted to Paris via high speed rail; 1.5 hours each direction made it feasible for them to work in a major metro without having to move there. So that's good. On the other hand, the investment required to pull that off is staggering. Europe taxes heavily to pay for the infrastructure. The people involved in that infrastructure were interviewed saying to expect it to take 20-30 years to build. Then on the other hand, we got the to moon and built the interstate highway system. Then on the other hand, it's easier to link Brussels to Paris than it is to link Chicago to Houston.
- gcampbell 17y ago
  On the other other hand, it should be roughly as easy to link San Francisco and LA as it was to link Madrid and Seville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid-Sevilla_high-speed_rail_line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid-Sevilla_high-speed_rail_...).
  - hughprime 17y ago
    The main problem with high speed rail in California is that LA isn't really a city, it's just a vast populated basin. You might get dropped at a station called "Los Angeles", but you're probably still an hour's drive from whatever part of Los Angeles you want to be in. Once you've gone through the hassle of renting a car at the station and driving to where you want to be, you might as well have driven all the way from San Francisco.
    - Mz 17y ago
      I vaguely recall that LA was served by train when it was first built -- I mean, internally for local commuting purposes. My understanding is that LA was built so spread out because it is in the desert and it wasn't economically feasible to develop it without doing huge swaths at a time because of the cost of infrastructure required to pipe in water from elsewhere. I went to UC-Riverside in the LA basin for 8 weeks. I took the bus down from the SF Bay area and lived without a car the first four weeks. I brought my car the second four weeks. Local bus service was surprisingly good. The area I lived for 8 weeks was surprisingly pedestrian-friendly (except for the small detail that I was threatening to go into anaphylactic shock every time I left the building thanks to the smog). The city in the SF Bay area where I lived for five years or so also had better local bus service and was more pedestrian friendly than many places I have lived. My recollection is that SF Bay is one of the few places in the US where population densities are similar to parts of Europe. If I recall correctly, it also has one of the more heavily used Amtrak lines. I think a lot of folks who are used to driving simply lack the skills and mindset to cope effectively without a car. So they routinely go back to their default and think the solution is either bring your own car or rent one. That isn't necessarily the case.
- skolor 17y ago
  the investment required to pull that off is staggering. Europe taxes heavily to pay for the infrastructure. The problem is, we (America) have been neglecting our infrastructure for far too long. As a country, we've been doing little more than keeping our existing infrastructure in working condition, and only upgrading where it was absolutely necessary. We should have been incrementally upgrading our infrastructure over the past 50 years, but we haven't been. I always find it staggering how location locked much of the US population is. Finding middle aged people who have never been more than 20 miles from where they were born simply floors me. We are in desperate need of affordable mass transportation, and high-speed rail seems to be the best way to achieve that. If the current administration can at least start the upgrades to our Transportation and Communication infrastructure that we need, at least enough to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world, I will consider it a massive success.
  - chasingsparks 17y ago
    Not to be a dick, but I am hoping you can save me time. I have heard the assertion that Americans are more land locked than other (well, European) countries, but I have never seen anything more than anecdotes. Does anyone actually know of any serious comparisons? It seems to me that a similar anecdote would be the "American's own more cars than any other group and are ridiculously mobile." I would side with the latter anecdote.
    - skolor 17y ago
      "American's own more cars than any other group and are ridiculously mobile." I don't have any hard, general statistics, but back in high school we did a rather informal survey, with a relatively small sample size (~50 students). Out of them roughly 80% had never left the state (Florida), of those that had, only 8% had left the country. There were also 20% of the students had never been outside of the county we were in (the ~20 miles from home I mentioned). It certainly seems to me an inverse relationship between car ownership and mobility (on a large scale). While a car allows you massive mobility in a relatively short range, you have to be actively driving and paying attention the entire time, making it much harder to travel long distances. With mass transportation (train, place, bus, etc) you can get on and fall asleep for all that it matters to your mobility. The lack of mass/public transportation seems to be the biggest hindrance to US mobility. Your choices are largely: Fly or Drive. If you Fly, you have to put up with the usual litany of plane complaints, and then you have to rent a vehicle when you arrive at your destination, due to the lack of reasonably accessible public transportation in most areas. If you choose to drive, getting anywhere will usually take several days, and puts a massive amount of wear on your car and the driver. I'm not sure if you've ever gone on a sizable road trip, but two years ago I did 5k miles of driving for a family vacation. I have to tell you, it was rough. Long distance driving is vastly different from driving around the city, and much more difficult on the driver.
javery 17y ago
The Route Map is very interesting: http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloads/RRdev/hsrmap-lv.pdf http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloads/RRdev/hsrmap-lv.pdf It seems odd you would be able to go from Boston to Houston on all high-speed but not New York to Chicago. I think they should add that Buffalo to Cleveland rout to the high-speed list. Of course it probably has to do with the condition of the existing rails and the terrain.
- hristov 17y ago
  Southern senators need their pork. Logically the south is not the best place to put rail because they do not have the large population centers, but politically there has to be just as much rail in the south as in the northeast or the southern congresspeople will destroy any legislation. This is one of the reasons Amtrak has been losing money, btw.
  - wallflower 17y ago
    "Amtrak operates corridor routes (covering distances under 400 miles) and long-distance routes (over 400 miles in length)...Virtually all of Amtrak's 44 or so routes lose money but the long-distance routes lose the most... In congressional testimony the DOT IG stated that long-distance trains accounted for only 15% of total inter-city ridership.." http://lieberman.senate.gov/documents/crs/amtrak.pdf http://lieberman.senate.gov/documents/crs/amtrak.pdf
  - skolor 17y ago
    This statement confuses me. Looking at that map, it looks like most of the rail is being put in places that could most use it. There are a few confusing places (like the Buffalo-Cleveland being left out), but for the most part it seems to be linking the major city centers for those areas together. I do wonder about that little Florida circuit, especially why it isn't being connected to the rest of the huge Houston->All of the East coast circuit. I also wonder why Kentucky/Tennessee are left out.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    The other reasons being that they provide a mostly terrible service that is impractical for routine use to an uninteresting market with an ineffective pricing scheme. But yeah, pork is bad too.
inaka 17y ago
I would refer the high-speed-rail types to James Kunstler's brilliant post 'financial crisis called off' where he reminds us... We blather about high speed rail, but you can't even get from Cleveland to Cincinnati on a regular train - and what's more amazing, nobody is really interested in making this happen. All we really care about is finding some miracle method to keep all the cars running. http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/financial-crisis-called-off.html http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/financial-crisis-called-off...
snewe 17y ago
Biden dreams of a wonderful new way to travel: "Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes." Now imagine that people actually start taking trains. Wouldn't you expect the TSA to start screening trains too?
- javery 17y ago
  There is much less danger on a train vs. a plane. A bomb would only destroy a section of a train and you can't really hi-jack a train and do much damage.
  - alain94040 17y ago
    you can't really hi-jack a train So true. You can try, though. Let me know how it goes :-) For sure in Europe, there is no security screening for high-speed trains like there is for planes. You'd have to be paranoid to setup the same structure (or a big hater of trains).
    - davidw 17y ago
      I did have to quickly go through a metal detector (IIRC) to get on a train in Spain. But it was nothing like airport security. This is a politics article though (hint: whitehouse). It should not be here.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        This is not a politics article, David. It's about high speed rail, not about the politics of high speed rail.
  - tsuraan 17y ago
    Besides the difficulty involved in driving a train into a building, I'm guessing it's a lot easier to destroy a train from the outside. There's no point screening passengers when anybody who wants to can throw rocks at trains, put logs across the tracks, whatever. Edit: plane, train, whatever...
iterationx 17y ago
Won't this create more urban sprawl? I'm also not convinced they won't have security screening for the high speed rail. I wonder if they do in Spain because of 911 + 912.
- carbon8 17y ago
  "Won't this create more urban sprawl?" Trains contribute to sprawl, but differently than cars. American-style sprawl is the result of individuals using cars for all transportation. Communities that don't rely on cars and use trains for distance travel/commuting clump around stations as more people walk and bike when going short distances. Less wasted space.
- m0th87 17y ago
  This is about linking major metropolitan areas together, not accommodating those who wish to suburbs. One of the central tenants of this plan is that these stations should be in the heart of the cities (as is done in Europe) rather than a major commute away. Also, I just returned from backpacking in Europe, where we used rail as our primary mode of transport. Security is minimal; among my three trips on rail in Spain, we never had our passports checked and our bags were only scanned once in Barcelona.
  - profgubler 17y ago
    This is exactly why there is a lot of opposition to high speed rail in the US. It primarily helps those who live inside major cities. When constituents feel like they are paying for something that they are not benefiting from they will oppose it.
- yellowbkpk 17y ago
  No, it will reduce urban sprawl. A quality rail network will bring the population in to the city center where it is easier to get to the train station and airport.
- masklinn 17y ago
  > Won't this create more urban sprawl? No, because train stations are usually in or very close to inner city centers (airports are noisy, generate loads of waste and need enormous amounts of space so you have to get them out and far). In fact if done correctly it would probably bring americans back to city centers, closer to the stations and better able to hop onto a train and ride to the next town, 200 miles and an hour away. > I'm also not convinced they won't have security screening for the high speed rail. I don't know of any european nation with anything even remotely close to airport security in train stations. In France, you can literally arrive a minute before departure and hop on your high-speed train (it's not recommended because the risk of missing your train is high, but it's possible).
ujjwalg 17y ago
Being from India (where the rail system is awesome, even though its not high speed), having extensive traveling experience in Europe and an avid hater of driving, I love the fact that something is happening in this area in US. When I came to US, I was surprised to see the only modes of traveling being driving or flying. My friends told me its because the auto lobbying in US is so powerful that they don't let any public transportation system to develop. I believed them. I am not saying it is true but I cannot figure out a reason why public transportation system across US sucks and even though this venture is highly cost intensive, IMO, it will be well worth it. Also, I dont understand people who prefer driving 8 hours, rather than sitting in a train, stress free and can actually use their time to work/read/socialize.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  I far prefer driving to riding a train (or flying, except for the first and last 20 minutes). Sitting in a train is not stress-free, for one thing. There are all these people around you, who you can't just ignore completely, and yet with whom you are not friends. It's like being at a party where you know no one, and parties are hard enough to deal with even if you know everyone at them. Secondly, there's not really enough room to work unless you can do your work on a phone; even if there were enough room for a decent-sized laptop between you and the seat in front, you'd still have to put everything away and get up whenever the people away from the aisle wanted out, which is every 15 minutes or so, seemingly. This problem also exists for reading. Also, when you're driving, there's always the possibility of stopping at something that interests you, or taking a different route. You are in control of your own movement, in a way that you aren't at all in a train, where you can't realistically choose to do something differently. Even a comfortable jail is still jail (though Amtrak, at least, is no more comfortable than business-class flying), and while you might choose to put yourself in a traveling jail for 12 hours, the lack of freedom to choose differently halfway through will, of course, wear on you. I took a train when I moved from Alabama to the DC metro area last year, and I quickly realized I should have flown. There was absolutely nothing to recommend the experience over flying, which is very similar, except much shorter and somewhat cheaper (and Amtrak, the train I took, is subsidized, so a train that actually reflected its true cost in the ticket price would be, at current standards, an economy-class experience with a luxury-class price).
onreact-com 17y ago
When you take a look at the map you only can think: This can't be all of it. Some areas have no high speed rail at all and the areas that have are often isolated from each other. In Germany we have high speed rail all over the place, in France it's similar. It has been there for years. Japan is best at building high speed railway systems.
- warfangle 17y ago
  If we can retrofit the foundries of the rustbelt to build this stuff, we might be able to give Japan a run for its money. Maybe. If we actually do it, instead of hemming and hawing about it.
- hughprime 17y ago
  Germany and Japan are tiny, though. Hell, Japan is virtually one-dimensional, which makes it a great place for building rail lines.
johnohara 17y ago
Paris to Brussels is 165 miles. 1.5 hours @ 110 mph Chicago to St. Louis is 298 miles. 1.5 hours @ 198 mph Chicago to Houston is 938 miles. 1.5 hours @ 625 mph The upper limit for maglev trains in 2009 is ~312 mph. The reason high-speed is not in place in the USA has more to do with the problem we were trying to solve using air travel than it had to do with whether high-speed rail would work. Here in Chicago, we have one of the nation's finest commuter rail systems (METRA). It works great, runs on time, defeats bad weather, etc. -- for distances <= 50 miles. Beyond that, the cost-benefit analysis get hazy.
technomancy 17y ago
Bah; everyone knows Rails can't scale.
benatkin 17y ago
Why not try and get one high-speed rail link right before trying to build them all over the country? The Acela Express can go up to 150mph, but it is prohibited from going that speed in a lot of areas, and from what I've read it isn't very reliable. http://is.gd/39PZO http://is.gd/39PZO Of course, the Obama Administration will avoid any project where they can be expected to have made measurable progress in six months. It's much easier for them to just keep talking about what they're working on than it is to actually fix anything.
- tptacek 17y ago
  So, I don't know that much about what train service between NYC, Philly, Boston, and DC was like before the Acela, but I do know that everyone in my company that travels between those locations uses Acela almost exclusively. I know it can't do max speed all the way between NYC and Boston, but it's still the best way to get from NYC to Boston.
  - yan 17y ago
    ++. When I got my NY->MD travel paid for, I always went with Acela. About two hours from Penn Station, and you're in BWI. No airport or driving hassle.
- warfangle 17y ago
  The Accela is an Amtrak train that sometimes goes highway speeds (as opposed to, with Amtrak, almost never) and costs three times as much. Blerg.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    The thing you're not acknowledging is that for trips under 3-4 hours, highway speeds + highway overhead beats jet speeds + jet overhead. It's a coin flip whether driving Chicago -> Detroit is better than flying it. You don't need to be better than highway speed to be extremely valuable. The Acela is a much easier way to get from NYC to Boston than driving (done both), and it's more reliable and sometimes faster than flying.
  - 17y ago
symesc 17y ago
The problem with many of the cities on this plan: no good public transit once you get off the city-to-city train.
eru 17y ago
I heard there will be almost as fast as regular European trains.
chasingsparks 17y ago
FYI: http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6470 http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6470 Webcast at 12:00 today.

32 points by iamwil 17y ago

There was a segment on NPR about this last weekend, centering on a husband/wife couple that lived in Belgium and commuted to Paris via high speed rail; 1.5 hours each direction made it feasible for them to work in a major metro without having to move there. So that's good. On the other hand, the investment required to pull that off is staggering. Europe taxes heavily to pay for the infrastructure. The people involved in that infrastructure were interviewed saying to expect it to take 20-30 years to build. Then on the other hand, we got the to moon and built the interstate highway system. Then on the other hand, it's easier to link Brussels to Paris than it is to link Chicago to Houston.

gcampbell 17y ago
On the other other hand, it should be roughly as easy to link San Francisco and LA as it was to link Madrid and Seville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid-Sevilla_high-speed_rail_line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid-Sevilla_high-speed_rail_...).
- hughprime 17y ago
  The main problem with high speed rail in California is that LA isn't really a city, it's just a vast populated basin. You might get dropped at a station called "Los Angeles", but you're probably still an hour's drive from whatever part of Los Angeles you want to be in. Once you've gone through the hassle of renting a car at the station and driving to where you want to be, you might as well have driven all the way from San Francisco.
  - Mz 17y ago
    I vaguely recall that LA was served by train when it was first built -- I mean, internally for local commuting purposes. My understanding is that LA was built so spread out because it is in the desert and it wasn't economically feasible to develop it without doing huge swaths at a time because of the cost of infrastructure required to pipe in water from elsewhere. I went to UC-Riverside in the LA basin for 8 weeks. I took the bus down from the SF Bay area and lived without a car the first four weeks. I brought my car the second four weeks. Local bus service was surprisingly good. The area I lived for 8 weeks was surprisingly pedestrian-friendly (except for the small detail that I was threatening to go into anaphylactic shock every time I left the building thanks to the smog). The city in the SF Bay area where I lived for five years or so also had better local bus service and was more pedestrian friendly than many places I have lived. My recollection is that SF Bay is one of the few places in the US where population densities are similar to parts of Europe. If I recall correctly, it also has one of the more heavily used Amtrak lines. I think a lot of folks who are used to driving simply lack the skills and mindset to cope effectively without a car. So they routinely go back to their default and think the solution is either bring your own car or rent one. That isn't necessarily the case.
skolor 17y ago
the investment required to pull that off is staggering. Europe taxes heavily to pay for the infrastructure. The problem is, we (America) have been neglecting our infrastructure for far too long. As a country, we've been doing little more than keeping our existing infrastructure in working condition, and only upgrading where it was absolutely necessary. We should have been incrementally upgrading our infrastructure over the past 50 years, but we haven't been. I always find it staggering how location locked much of the US population is. Finding middle aged people who have never been more than 20 miles from where they were born simply floors me. We are in desperate need of affordable mass transportation, and high-speed rail seems to be the best way to achieve that. If the current administration can at least start the upgrades to our Transportation and Communication infrastructure that we need, at least enough to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world, I will consider it a massive success.
- chasingsparks 17y ago
  Not to be a dick, but I am hoping you can save me time. I have heard the assertion that Americans are more land locked than other (well, European) countries, but I have never seen anything more than anecdotes. Does anyone actually know of any serious comparisons? It seems to me that a similar anecdote would be the "American's own more cars than any other group and are ridiculously mobile." I would side with the latter anecdote.
  - skolor 17y ago
    "American's own more cars than any other group and are ridiculously mobile." I don't have any hard, general statistics, but back in high school we did a rather informal survey, with a relatively small sample size (~50 students). Out of them roughly 80% had never left the state (Florida), of those that had, only 8% had left the country. There were also 20% of the students had never been outside of the county we were in (the ~20 miles from home I mentioned). It certainly seems to me an inverse relationship between car ownership and mobility (on a large scale). While a car allows you massive mobility in a relatively short range, you have to be actively driving and paying attention the entire time, making it much harder to travel long distances. With mass transportation (train, place, bus, etc) you can get on and fall asleep for all that it matters to your mobility. The lack of mass/public transportation seems to be the biggest hindrance to US mobility. Your choices are largely: Fly or Drive. If you Fly, you have to put up with the usual litany of plane complaints, and then you have to rent a vehicle when you arrive at your destination, due to the lack of reasonably accessible public transportation in most areas. If you choose to drive, getting anywhere will usually take several days, and puts a massive amount of wear on your car and the driver. I'm not sure if you've ever gone on a sizable road trip, but two years ago I did 5k miles of driving for a family vacation. I have to tell you, it was rough. Long distance driving is vastly different from driving around the city, and much more difficult on the driver.

javery 17y ago

The Route Map is very interesting: http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloads/RRdev/hsrmap-lv.pdf http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloads/RRdev/hsrmap-lv.pdf It seems odd you would be able to go from Boston to Houston on all high-speed but not New York to Chicago. I think they should add that Buffalo to Cleveland rout to the high-speed list. Of course it probably has to do with the condition of the existing rails and the terrain.

hristov 17y ago
Southern senators need their pork. Logically the south is not the best place to put rail because they do not have the large population centers, but politically there has to be just as much rail in the south as in the northeast or the southern congresspeople will destroy any legislation. This is one of the reasons Amtrak has been losing money, btw.
- wallflower 17y ago
  "Amtrak operates corridor routes (covering distances under 400 miles) and long-distance routes (over 400 miles in length)...Virtually all of Amtrak's 44 or so routes lose money but the long-distance routes lose the most... In congressional testimony the DOT IG stated that long-distance trains accounted for only 15% of total inter-city ridership.." http://lieberman.senate.gov/documents/crs/amtrak.pdf http://lieberman.senate.gov/documents/crs/amtrak.pdf
- skolor 17y ago
  This statement confuses me. Looking at that map, it looks like most of the rail is being put in places that could most use it. There are a few confusing places (like the Buffalo-Cleveland being left out), but for the most part it seems to be linking the major city centers for those areas together. I do wonder about that little Florida circuit, especially why it isn't being connected to the rest of the huge Houston->All of the East coast circuit. I also wonder why Kentucky/Tennessee are left out.
- tptacek 17y ago
  The other reasons being that they provide a mostly terrible service that is impractical for routine use to an uninteresting market with an ineffective pricing scheme. But yeah, pork is bad too.

inaka 17y ago

I would refer the high-speed-rail types to James Kunstler's brilliant post 'financial crisis called off' where he reminds us... We blather about high speed rail, but you can't even get from Cleveland to Cincinnati on a regular train - and what's more amazing, nobody is really interested in making this happen. All we really care about is finding some miracle method to keep all the cars running. http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/financial-crisis-called-off.html http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/financial-crisis-called-off...

snewe 17y ago

Biden dreams of a wonderful new way to travel: "Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes." Now imagine that people actually start taking trains. Wouldn't you expect the TSA to start screening trains too?

javery 17y ago
There is much less danger on a train vs. a plane. A bomb would only destroy a section of a train and you can't really hi-jack a train and do much damage.
- alain94040 17y ago
  you can't really hi-jack a train So true. You can try, though. Let me know how it goes :-) For sure in Europe, there is no security screening for high-speed trains like there is for planes. You'd have to be paranoid to setup the same structure (or a big hater of trains).
  - davidw 17y ago
    I did have to quickly go through a metal detector (IIRC) to get on a train in Spain. But it was nothing like airport security. This is a politics article though (hint: whitehouse). It should not be here.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      This is not a politics article, David. It's about high speed rail, not about the politics of high speed rail.
- tsuraan 17y ago
  Besides the difficulty involved in driving a train into a building, I'm guessing it's a lot easier to destroy a train from the outside. There's no point screening passengers when anybody who wants to can throw rocks at trains, put logs across the tracks, whatever. Edit: plane, train, whatever...

iterationx 17y ago

Won't this create more urban sprawl? I'm also not convinced they won't have security screening for the high speed rail. I wonder if they do in Spain because of 911 + 912.

carbon8 17y ago
"Won't this create more urban sprawl?" Trains contribute to sprawl, but differently than cars. American-style sprawl is the result of individuals using cars for all transportation. Communities that don't rely on cars and use trains for distance travel/commuting clump around stations as more people walk and bike when going short distances. Less wasted space.
m0th87 17y ago
This is about linking major metropolitan areas together, not accommodating those who wish to suburbs. One of the central tenants of this plan is that these stations should be in the heart of the cities (as is done in Europe) rather than a major commute away. Also, I just returned from backpacking in Europe, where we used rail as our primary mode of transport. Security is minimal; among my three trips on rail in Spain, we never had our passports checked and our bags were only scanned once in Barcelona.
- profgubler 17y ago
  This is exactly why there is a lot of opposition to high speed rail in the US. It primarily helps those who live inside major cities. When constituents feel like they are paying for something that they are not benefiting from they will oppose it.
yellowbkpk 17y ago
No, it will reduce urban sprawl. A quality rail network will bring the population in to the city center where it is easier to get to the train station and airport.
masklinn 17y ago
> Won't this create more urban sprawl? No, because train stations are usually in or very close to inner city centers (airports are noisy, generate loads of waste and need enormous amounts of space so you have to get them out and far). In fact if done correctly it would probably bring americans back to city centers, closer to the stations and better able to hop onto a train and ride to the next town, 200 miles and an hour away. > I'm also not convinced they won't have security screening for the high speed rail. I don't know of any european nation with anything even remotely close to airport security in train stations. In France, you can literally arrive a minute before departure and hop on your high-speed train (it's not recommended because the risk of missing your train is high, but it's possible).

ujjwalg 17y ago

Being from India (where the rail system is awesome, even though its not high speed), having extensive traveling experience in Europe and an avid hater of driving, I love the fact that something is happening in this area in US. When I came to US, I was surprised to see the only modes of traveling being driving or flying. My friends told me its because the auto lobbying in US is so powerful that they don't let any public transportation system to develop. I believed them. I am not saying it is true but I cannot figure out a reason why public transportation system across US sucks and even though this venture is highly cost intensive, IMO, it will be well worth it. Also, I dont understand people who prefer driving 8 hours, rather than sitting in a train, stress free and can actually use their time to work/read/socialize.

randallsquared 17y ago
I far prefer driving to riding a train (or flying, except for the first and last 20 minutes). Sitting in a train is not stress-free, for one thing. There are all these people around you, who you can't just ignore completely, and yet with whom you are not friends. It's like being at a party where you know no one, and parties are hard enough to deal with even if you know everyone at them. Secondly, there's not really enough room to work unless you can do your work on a phone; even if there were enough room for a decent-sized laptop between you and the seat in front, you'd still have to put everything away and get up whenever the people away from the aisle wanted out, which is every 15 minutes or so, seemingly. This problem also exists for reading. Also, when you're driving, there's always the possibility of stopping at something that interests you, or taking a different route. You are in control of your own movement, in a way that you aren't at all in a train, where you can't realistically choose to do something differently. Even a comfortable jail is still jail (though Amtrak, at least, is no more comfortable than business-class flying), and while you might choose to put yourself in a traveling jail for 12 hours, the lack of freedom to choose differently halfway through will, of course, wear on you. I took a train when I moved from Alabama to the DC metro area last year, and I quickly realized I should have flown. There was absolutely nothing to recommend the experience over flying, which is very similar, except much shorter and somewhat cheaper (and Amtrak, the train I took, is subsidized, so a train that actually reflected its true cost in the ticket price would be, at current standards, an economy-class experience with a luxury-class price).

onreact-com 17y ago

When you take a look at the map you only can think: This can't be all of it. Some areas have no high speed rail at all and the areas that have are often isolated from each other. In Germany we have high speed rail all over the place, in France it's similar. It has been there for years. Japan is best at building high speed railway systems.

warfangle 17y ago
If we can retrofit the foundries of the rustbelt to build this stuff, we might be able to give Japan a run for its money. Maybe. If we actually do it, instead of hemming and hawing about it.
hughprime 17y ago
Germany and Japan are tiny, though. Hell, Japan is virtually one-dimensional, which makes it a great place for building rail lines.

johnohara 17y ago

Paris to Brussels is 165 miles. 1.5 hours @ 110 mph Chicago to St. Louis is 298 miles. 1.5 hours @ 198 mph Chicago to Houston is 938 miles. 1.5 hours @ 625 mph The upper limit for maglev trains in 2009 is ~312 mph. The reason high-speed is not in place in the USA has more to do with the problem we were trying to solve using air travel than it had to do with whether high-speed rail would work. Here in Chicago, we have one of the nation's finest commuter rail systems (METRA). It works great, runs on time, defeats bad weather, etc. -- for distances <= 50 miles. Beyond that, the cost-benefit analysis get hazy.

technomancy 17y ago

Bah; everyone knows Rails can't scale.

benatkin 17y ago

Why not try and get one high-speed rail link right before trying to build them all over the country? The Acela Express can go up to 150mph, but it is prohibited from going that speed in a lot of areas, and from what I've read it isn't very reliable. http://is.gd/39PZO http://is.gd/39PZO Of course, the Obama Administration will avoid any project where they can be expected to have made measurable progress in six months. It's much easier for them to just keep talking about what they're working on than it is to actually fix anything.

tptacek 17y ago
So, I don't know that much about what train service between NYC, Philly, Boston, and DC was like before the Acela, but I do know that everyone in my company that travels between those locations uses Acela almost exclusively. I know it can't do max speed all the way between NYC and Boston, but it's still the best way to get from NYC to Boston.
- yan 17y ago
  ++. When I got my NY->MD travel paid for, I always went with Acela. About two hours from Penn Station, and you're in BWI. No airport or driving hassle.
warfangle 17y ago
The Accela is an Amtrak train that sometimes goes highway speeds (as opposed to, with Amtrak, almost never) and costs three times as much. Blerg.
- tptacek 17y ago
  The thing you're not acknowledging is that for trips under 3-4 hours, highway speeds + highway overhead beats jet speeds + jet overhead. It's a coin flip whether driving Chicago -> Detroit is better than flying it. You don't need to be better than highway speed to be extremely valuable. The Acela is a much easier way to get from NYC to Boston than driving (done both), and it's more reliable and sometimes faster than flying.
- 17y ago

symesc 17y ago

The problem with many of the cities on this plan: no good public transit once you get off the city-to-city train.

eru 17y ago

I heard there will be almost as fast as regular European trains.

chasingsparks 17y ago

FYI: http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6470 http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6470 Webcast at 12:00 today.