10 ms·

The question is why? Why should the U.S. spend billions on a great passenger rail system? High speed rail is almost always a serious money loser. What are the b

The question is why? Why should the U.S. spend billions on a great passenger rail system? High speed rail is almost always a serious money loser. What are the benefits? Japan and Europe's high speed rail is nice, but it hasn't necessarily resulted in a greater share of passengers taking rail. "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?" http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/highspeed-rail-wrong-road-america http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/highspeed-r... And some environmentalist don't like it either. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/california-high-speed-rail-waste-time-and-money http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/california-hi... Most people don't know that the U.S. has a great freight rail network. U.S. passenger rail obviously isn't great, but U.S. freight rail is the best in the world. http://business.time.com/2012/07/09/us-freight-railroads/ http://business.time.com/2012/07/09/us-freight-railroads/ I just don't know why the U.S. should build high speed rail, other than the fact that it is fun to ride.

cactusface 11y ago
Less cars on the road?
- deelowe 11y ago
  That has to actually happen to be true. The OP's point is that it doesn't actually result in more people taking rail.
  - cactusface 11y ago
    Correlation is not causation? How does the introduction of high speed rail reasonably result in people deciding not to take the train?
willyt 11y ago
It's not a money loser. TGV is highly profitable in France. All the major intercity routes in the UK run at a profit and these operate at 125-140mph, which is high speed by US standards.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > TGV is highly profitable in France. LOL. French here. I am not sure where you get that impression, but TGV lines cost dozens of billions of euros to be built, and the ROI is calculated in 30-40 years time, so saying the "TGV is highly profitable" is a pure lie, because we don't know in 40 years if people will still take it as much as now. On top of that, the SNCF (public company operating the TGV) is a sponge debt and if it were not for the ongoing government spending to keep it alive every single year with huge cash injections, it would have disappeared long ago. Yeah "highly profitable", hey.
  - zanny 11y ago
    The national highway system isn't making anyone any money, and we don't criticize it for costing upkeep and the billions it cost to build. I'm of the opinion that good infrastructure should not be turning a profit. If it were profitable out of the gate you would just let private enterprise build it. The reason you get the state involved is because good infrastructure like high speed rail is a force multiplier on the effectiveness of everyone around it, even when it isn't turning a profit in and of itself (and usually you get the best societal value out of these things when they are a loss leader, and tickets are not prohibitively expensive...). You want a high speed rail system in California so that hundreds of thousands or millions of workers could stop spending significantly more combined time and money on the much more inefficient road network when it comes to commuting. It would be a net positive in less need to maintain over-capacity highways, less car deaths, less anxiety and stress from the traffic conditions, and more workplace mobility along the rail lines.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      > and we don't criticize it for costing upkeep and the billions it cost to build. Why shouldn't we criticize it ? Ever read Bastiat ? The money you spend somewhere is money you don't spend somewhere else. Wouldn't that be better to spend those billions in better schools, better hospitals, better metros, etc ? The choices you made have long ramifications in time and billions do not come cheap.
avz 11y ago
Some benefits of a functioning railway system: - increased throughput compared to highways due to lower volume per passenger (something the US is trying to achieve with carpooling lines), - increased reliability (there are no train-jams), - increased passenger convenience (no need to look for parking or do maintenance on the train you ride), - increased passenger productivity (you can work or read on a train), - ease of transition to green source of energy. Advantages of the car over the train: - greater flexibility (generally roads offer denser network than railways, even in Europe or Japan), - car is much more convenient for families with children. I love trains. I love driving. I find that the latter is much more fun and convenience in places where the former works well. San Francisco's 101 could be one of such places if Caltrain was more like SBB. EDIT: one more important benefit of the train: - increased safety (much fewer fatalities per passenger; also no need for a designated driver when you go to a party).
- hueving 11y ago
  Most of your train benefits are only relevant to local trains. The interstates outside of the big cities aren't really crowded at all (e.g. The 101 through central CA).
  - mentat 11y ago
    That hasn't been my experience with the 5 going from north to south or south to north.
- Coding_Cat 11y ago
  > -increased reliability (there are no train-jams), ``Ding dong Due to planned maintenance/a defective signal/ a computer error/ a tree on the tracks (or a leaf, or snow)/a collision with a person no connection is possible between Utrecht Central and Amsterdam Central.'' Generally you can take a detour, or busses will be employed to ferry people (after several hours usually), but it's not a very uncommon situation, I'd say we have a really major jam about 2-4 times a year, hard to judge. Still prefer the train over the car, but when I need to go to the airport to catch a plane I won't risk it. Also, our main rail maintainer, train provider, and the Gov't officials involved are a special kind of screw-up. So it might be a whole lot better if you can get the right people in charge.
Coding_Cat 11y ago
Generally, non-hs trains go as fast as you would on the highway or a bit faster anyway. In the Netherlands our normal trains have a speed limit of 90 Mph I believe, but Wikipedia tells me that 80-120Mph is the normal range for intercitys. HS lines are often 180Mph+.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  Yes, but train tracks are often a more direct line, and they rarely have to stop or slow down for anything; when driving, your speed is generally reduced severely once you get off the highway. Of course, it also depends heavily on where you're coming from / going to; the train commuters often live and work nearby a train station (I do).
Brakenshire 11y ago
The bit you've quoted from Cato is not a solid point, in my opinion. It is conflating two different things - local / commuter rail, which is in competition with cars, and high speed rail, which is not. Clearly there has been a massive long term trend towards increasing dominance of the car over the last sixty years, but there has never been any expectation that high speed rail could reverse that trend - after all, the vast majority of journeys and of journey miles are not between cities, but everyday local transport, which has nothing to do with high speed rail. The benefits are really to do with bringing city centres closer together, to be able to get on a train in London and arrive in Paris (220 miles away, and across a sea) within two and a half hours, or in Manchester (170 miles away) within an hour - the latter is the subject of the next high speed line project in the UK. It would take four hours to drive London to Manchester, on excellent motorways, and an hour would hardly get you from the city centre to the start of Heathrow airport security. Having another city within an hour of two of hassle free travel just alters fundamentally the sense of distance between those cities. Bridge building is also often not profitable, but has a long term effect on interconnectedness and the development of the area around.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Being profitable shouldn't be the only measure to implement or improve a public transit system TBF; faster transit times, cleaner fuel, lower highway usage, less stress from driving, working on the go (if people work in coffee shops they can work in the train), tax benefits, cheaper commute costs, all of those should be taken into consideration too. It's not a crime for a government to fund an unprofitable business if said business does good things.
- alxndr 11y ago
  In fact, it might be considered one of the purposes of a government.
- allan_s 11y ago
  it's exactly why education, especially primary schools etc. are financed by the government in a lot of countries, because educating the mass is not profitable.
m_mueller 11y ago
Why are you quoting political thinktanks as verbatim. Their job is to pick out facts and arrange them so that it suits their narrative. Let's shine some light on their spin: (a) Japanese HSR. It started in 1964[1]. Is anyone surprised that it lost 50% of its market share to cars if cars were literally at the verge of becoming popular when it started? Japan is a huge car country. The relevant statistic here is that an average Japanese does 25x the rail kilometers per year an American is doing[2], yet has less car km per year[3]. They are second only to Switzerland in that statistic. Japan's railway companies are profitable, both as HSR[5] and local transport in big cities[4]. (b) Rail in Europe: Why are two countries picked out and then their success is measured by the market share in all of Europe, including the severely underdeveloped East? Europe is a big and diverse place too. (c) "some environmentalist don't like it either" - I really don't see the relevance there. The freight train system in the US is a good point - IMO Europe and Asia should take it as an example. I still don't see the relevance for passenger rail though, it's a separate issue. The question is: Does is make sense to push public transport, both locally and regionally. Given that (a) we have examples like Japan that clearly show how it can work and (b) environmental footprint of each person needs to be drastically lowered if we want to survive as a 6+ billion species, I'd put my money on 'yes'. Edit: The USA is still the only big country with a carbon footprint way above 10 tonnes per capita and year. Americans still emit 1.8x the CO2 of Japan, even though Japanese houses have no isolation to speak of (earthquake safety / corrupt builders). It's getting better, but there's still a huge gap between the USA and and the rest of the highly industrialized world. Everyone needs to get better there, but there are a few countries that absolutely need to do a lot, or we're all fucked. So far I'd put USA, China and Russia on that list, soon probably India and Brazil as well. [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_country#Passenger_km_per_head_of_population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_countr... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate#cite_note-WHO2013-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re... (I don't have the source for car km per capita, but you can deduct it from this table) [4] https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/280/201 https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/280/201 [5] http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/investor/financial/2013/pdf/2013_financialresults.pdf http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/investor/financial/2013/pdf/2013_f... [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio...
delabel 11y ago
>High speed rail is almost always a serious money loser. Passenger rail is a public good, just like tax-funded public roads (which also don't make a profit, by the way.) Both are necessary for an effective and fully functioning transportation system. >Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. This is largely due to an increase in rural car ownership since the 60's and the closure of unprofitable rural lines. The profitable Tokaido Shinkansen's ridership continues to increase, with 75% of passenger trips between Osaka and Tokyo using the line. The Shinkansen between Tokyo and Hiroshima, which is a comparable distance to that of LA to SF, carries more than half of the passengers between those two cities. http://www.jrtr.net/jrtr48/pdf/f06_Tak.pdf http://www.jrtr.net/jrtr48/pdf/f06_Tak.pdf It seems to me that California High Speed Rail will have the greatest impact on medium distance trips where it is too far to conveniently drive and not cost effective to fly. For example, it may become more practical to commute between the central valley cities the Bay Area.
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
Because you don't spend time driving in traffic, you get from A to B way faster, and if properly designed you pollute much less.
lispm 11y ago
passenger rail system and 'high-speed rail' are two different things. If I want to take the train from Hamburg to Frankfurt, I can take the more expensive and faster ICE or a cheaper and slower EC or IC. personally I would not fly or use the car from Hamburg to Frankfurt, I would take the train, Fast, no check-in, city center to city center, full internet access (free for me). Plus I have a BahnCard 100, which allows me to use the whole German train system for one year. Fast and slow. local public transport and ICE. That beats the alternatives easily.
- monksy 11y ago
  > BahnCard 100 Nice! How much does that cost you? Also, why would you have that? (Those are really expensive)
  - markvdb 11y ago
    http://www.bahn.de/p/view/bahncard/ueberblick/bahncard100.shtml http://www.bahn.de/p/view/bahncard/ueberblick/bahncard100.sh... 4090€
bane 11y ago
Rail has a side-effect of also highly urbanizing travelers where secondary mass-transit systems (bus, subway, etc.) makes it easy to get from/to the train station.
sytelus 11y ago
You are kidding, right? Do you have any idea of how many hours of lives are lost in traffic? If you sum up all those hours and divide by average lifespan, I bet it comes out to few thousand people getting killed each day. Trains also hugely impact how much people must pay on housing. In areas with great train network, people can chose to live farther and still can avoid unreasonable commute. Just imagine what if Californians can spend their earnings on meaningful activities rather than just housing. When I visited Russia, I just began to realize how important is train network and how badly neglected it is in US. Moscow has one of the absolutely best train network anywhere - all built by Soviets. Trains comes every 2 mins, they are fast and there are plenty of routes with plenty of stops to basically go anywhere without wasting your life getting stuck in commute, finding parking and pay bucket loads of money on gas. In US, governments are extremely inefficient - no matter what party is in White House (this is not to say Russia is better but trains are something they did got right). People are always busy in philosophical issues around abortions, gay marriage, gun rights while doing 3 hours commute one way everyday in frustrating traffic never asking why government isn't fixing it for decades.
- narag 11y ago
  The idea of self-driving cars was only possible in the USA. In Europe it seems very alien because of the trains.
  - kjjw 11y ago
    Utter nonsense. Automated driving aids have been developed for a long time by European car manufactuerers. Audi is now testing a fully automated var. Daimler just released a partially self driving truck.
    - mkempe 11y ago
      Volvo is working on it as well. They are currently running a year-long experiment with a hundred self-driving cars in southern Sweden.
    - narag 11y ago
grey-area 11y ago
The question is why? Why should the U.S. spend billions on a great passenger rail system? High speed rail is almost always a serious money loser. What are the benefits? How much money does the state road infrastructure make? What are the benefits?
peyoNYC 11y ago
Market share is misleading as high speed trains have been deployed on only a few corridors. These are expensive systems that need high volumes - in which case they work. Checking train share of market by corridor gives a better view. Regarding info from Cato or Reason, I'd take it with caution. They used to produce good research but unfortunately they seem to be driven by ideological choices more than facts. Still a good read but needs fact-checking. Last - about environmentalists: the overall impact of high speed train depends on how many people ride it. California should be a no brainer as traffic potential is huge. I wouldn't say the same of Spain (where lines are under used). Overall: don't trust the definitive arguments. Most people have hidden agendas on the high speed rail topic. From a realistic analysis of facts, you may conclude that California hsr should easily be a commercial success, therefore environmentally good, and has a good chance to be profitable if properly managed/built. Texas hsr is the same. North east has a great potential but the costs are so high that just a small deviation ends up in huge sums of money in overspent. Guaranteed commercial success but risky from a construction/financial standpoint. Other projects can be more questionable. I've participated to a review of all them for a potential investor and this is what I remember of it. Don't take it as truth, check the facts.
6t6t6 11y ago
> High speed rail is almost always a serious money loser. What are the benefits? When people make this statements is usually because they forget the cost of building and maintaining roads and highways (that is payed by all taxpayers, even if they don't use the car), the actual cost of the land occupied by paved roads and parking (almost 50% in most cities), the deaths by traffic accidents, the deaths caused by the pollution, etc... Another thing that people use to forget is that low cost flights, the main competitor for high speed train, will be less and less competitive when the fuel prices will rise again. Taking cars out of the road is always a good investment. > If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States? This article uses one fallacy after the other. Some have been answered by others; but no one who has put a foot in France, and specially in Japan, would say that High Speed train doesn't work there.
malandrew 11y ago
What is valuable and what we need more of isn't regional trains is light commuter rail. This is the rapid transit system the SF Bay Area could have had today had people had more foresight to approve it back in the 1950s. http://www.jakecoolidgecartography.com/regional-rapid-transit-bay-area.html http://www.jakecoolidgecartography.com/regional-rapid-transi... https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4080507945/sizes/l/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4080507945/sizes/l/ Imagine the San Francisco Bay Area with a commuter train system comparable to that of NYC and the great NY Metropolitan Area.

cactusface 11y ago

Less cars on the road?

deelowe 11y ago
That has to actually happen to be true. The OP's point is that it doesn't actually result in more people taking rail.
- cactusface 11y ago
  Correlation is not causation? How does the introduction of high speed rail reasonably result in people deciding not to take the train?

willyt 11y ago

It's not a money loser. TGV is highly profitable in France. All the major intercity routes in the UK run at a profit and these operate at 125-140mph, which is high speed by US standards.

ekianjo 11y ago
> TGV is highly profitable in France. LOL. French here. I am not sure where you get that impression, but TGV lines cost dozens of billions of euros to be built, and the ROI is calculated in 30-40 years time, so saying the "TGV is highly profitable" is a pure lie, because we don't know in 40 years if people will still take it as much as now. On top of that, the SNCF (public company operating the TGV) is a sponge debt and if it were not for the ongoing government spending to keep it alive every single year with huge cash injections, it would have disappeared long ago. Yeah "highly profitable", hey.
- zanny 11y ago
  The national highway system isn't making anyone any money, and we don't criticize it for costing upkeep and the billions it cost to build. I'm of the opinion that good infrastructure should not be turning a profit. If it were profitable out of the gate you would just let private enterprise build it. The reason you get the state involved is because good infrastructure like high speed rail is a force multiplier on the effectiveness of everyone around it, even when it isn't turning a profit in and of itself (and usually you get the best societal value out of these things when they are a loss leader, and tickets are not prohibitively expensive...). You want a high speed rail system in California so that hundreds of thousands or millions of workers could stop spending significantly more combined time and money on the much more inefficient road network when it comes to commuting. It would be a net positive in less need to maintain over-capacity highways, less car deaths, less anxiety and stress from the traffic conditions, and more workplace mobility along the rail lines.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > and we don't criticize it for costing upkeep and the billions it cost to build. Why shouldn't we criticize it ? Ever read Bastiat ? The money you spend somewhere is money you don't spend somewhere else. Wouldn't that be better to spend those billions in better schools, better hospitals, better metros, etc ? The choices you made have long ramifications in time and billions do not come cheap.

avz 11y ago

Some benefits of a functioning railway system: - increased throughput compared to highways due to lower volume per passenger (something the US is trying to achieve with carpooling lines), - increased reliability (there are no train-jams), - increased passenger convenience (no need to look for parking or do maintenance on the train you ride), - increased passenger productivity (you can work or read on a train), - ease of transition to green source of energy. Advantages of the car over the train: - greater flexibility (generally roads offer denser network than railways, even in Europe or Japan), - car is much more convenient for families with children. I love trains. I love driving. I find that the latter is much more fun and convenience in places where the former works well. San Francisco's 101 could be one of such places if Caltrain was more like SBB. EDIT: one more important benefit of the train: - increased safety (much fewer fatalities per passenger; also no need for a designated driver when you go to a party).

hueving 11y ago
Most of your train benefits are only relevant to local trains. The interstates outside of the big cities aren't really crowded at all (e.g. The 101 through central CA).
- mentat 11y ago
  That hasn't been my experience with the 5 going from north to south or south to north.
Coding_Cat 11y ago
> -increased reliability (there are no train-jams), ``Ding dong Due to planned maintenance/a defective signal/ a computer error/ a tree on the tracks (or a leaf, or snow)/a collision with a person no connection is possible between Utrecht Central and Amsterdam Central.'' Generally you can take a detour, or busses will be employed to ferry people (after several hours usually), but it's not a very uncommon situation, I'd say we have a really major jam about 2-4 times a year, hard to judge. Still prefer the train over the car, but when I need to go to the airport to catch a plane I won't risk it. Also, our main rail maintainer, train provider, and the Gov't officials involved are a special kind of screw-up. So it might be a whole lot better if you can get the right people in charge.

Coding_Cat 11y ago

Generally, non-hs trains go as fast as you would on the highway or a bit faster anyway. In the Netherlands our normal trains have a speed limit of 90 Mph I believe, but Wikipedia tells me that 80-120Mph is the normal range for intercitys. HS lines are often 180Mph+.

Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Yes, but train tracks are often a more direct line, and they rarely have to stop or slow down for anything; when driving, your speed is generally reduced severely once you get off the highway. Of course, it also depends heavily on where you're coming from / going to; the train commuters often live and work nearby a train station (I do).

Brakenshire 11y ago

The bit you've quoted from Cato is not a solid point, in my opinion. It is conflating two different things - local / commuter rail, which is in competition with cars, and high speed rail, which is not. Clearly there has been a massive long term trend towards increasing dominance of the car over the last sixty years, but there has never been any expectation that high speed rail could reverse that trend - after all, the vast majority of journeys and of journey miles are not between cities, but everyday local transport, which has nothing to do with high speed rail. The benefits are really to do with bringing city centres closer together, to be able to get on a train in London and arrive in Paris (220 miles away, and across a sea) within two and a half hours, or in Manchester (170 miles away) within an hour - the latter is the subject of the next high speed line project in the UK. It would take four hours to drive London to Manchester, on excellent motorways, and an hour would hardly get you from the city centre to the start of Heathrow airport security. Having another city within an hour of two of hassle free travel just alters fundamentally the sense of distance between those cities. Bridge building is also often not profitable, but has a long term effect on interconnectedness and the development of the area around.

Cthulhu_ 11y ago

Being profitable shouldn't be the only measure to implement or improve a public transit system TBF; faster transit times, cleaner fuel, lower highway usage, less stress from driving, working on the go (if people work in coffee shops they can work in the train), tax benefits, cheaper commute costs, all of those should be taken into consideration too. It's not a crime for a government to fund an unprofitable business if said business does good things.

alxndr 11y ago
In fact, it might be considered one of the purposes of a government.
allan_s 11y ago
it's exactly why education, especially primary schools etc. are financed by the government in a lot of countries, because educating the mass is not profitable.

m_mueller 11y ago

Why are you quoting political thinktanks as verbatim. Their job is to pick out facts and arrange them so that it suits their narrative. Let's shine some light on their spin: (a) Japanese HSR. It started in 1964[1]. Is anyone surprised that it lost 50% of its market share to cars if cars were literally at the verge of becoming popular when it started? Japan is a huge car country. The relevant statistic here is that an average Japanese does 25x the rail kilometers per year an American is doing[2], yet has less car km per year[3]. They are second only to Switzerland in that statistic. Japan's railway companies are profitable, both as HSR[5] and local transport in big cities[4]. (b) Rail in Europe: Why are two countries picked out and then their success is measured by the market share in all of Europe, including the severely underdeveloped East? Europe is a big and diverse place too. (c) "some environmentalist don't like it either" - I really don't see the relevance there. The freight train system in the US is a good point - IMO Europe and Asia should take it as an example. I still don't see the relevance for passenger rail though, it's a separate issue. The question is: Does is make sense to push public transport, both locally and regionally. Given that (a) we have examples like Japan that clearly show how it can work and (b) environmental footprint of each person needs to be drastically lowered if we want to survive as a 6+ billion species, I'd put my money on 'yes'. Edit: The USA is still the only big country with a carbon footprint way above 10 tonnes per capita and year. Americans still emit 1.8x the CO2 of Japan, even though Japanese houses have no isolation to speak of (earthquake safety / corrupt builders). It's getting better, but there's still a huge gap between the USA and and the rest of the highly industrialized world. Everyone needs to get better there, but there are a few countries that absolutely need to do a lot, or we're all fucked. So far I'd put USA, China and Russia on that list, soon probably India and Brazil as well. [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_country#Passenger_km_per_head_of_population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_countr... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate#cite_note-WHO2013-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re... (I don't have the source for car km per capita, but you can deduct it from this table) [4] https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/280/201 https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/280/201 [5] http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/investor/financial/2013/pdf/2013_financialresults.pdf http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/investor/financial/2013/pdf/2013_f... [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio...

delabel 11y ago

>High speed rail is almost always a serious money loser. Passenger rail is a public good, just like tax-funded public roads (which also don't make a profit, by the way.) Both are necessary for an effective and fully functioning transportation system. >Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. This is largely due to an increase in rural car ownership since the 60's and the closure of unprofitable rural lines. The profitable Tokaido Shinkansen's ridership continues to increase, with 75% of passenger trips between Osaka and Tokyo using the line. The Shinkansen between Tokyo and Hiroshima, which is a comparable distance to that of LA to SF, carries more than half of the passengers between those two cities. http://www.jrtr.net/jrtr48/pdf/f06_Tak.pdf http://www.jrtr.net/jrtr48/pdf/f06_Tak.pdf It seems to me that California High Speed Rail will have the greatest impact on medium distance trips where it is too far to conveniently drive and not cost effective to fly. For example, it may become more practical to commute between the central valley cities the Bay Area.

simonebrunozzi 11y ago

Because you don't spend time driving in traffic, you get from A to B way faster, and if properly designed you pollute much less.

lispm 11y ago

passenger rail system and 'high-speed rail' are two different things. If I want to take the train from Hamburg to Frankfurt, I can take the more expensive and faster ICE or a cheaper and slower EC or IC. personally I would not fly or use the car from Hamburg to Frankfurt, I would take the train, Fast, no check-in, city center to city center, full internet access (free for me). Plus I have a BahnCard 100, which allows me to use the whole German train system for one year. Fast and slow. local public transport and ICE. That beats the alternatives easily.

monksy 11y ago
> BahnCard 100 Nice! How much does that cost you? Also, why would you have that? (Those are really expensive)
- markvdb 11y ago
  http://www.bahn.de/p/view/bahncard/ueberblick/bahncard100.shtml http://www.bahn.de/p/view/bahncard/ueberblick/bahncard100.sh... 4090€

bane 11y ago

Rail has a side-effect of also highly urbanizing travelers where secondary mass-transit systems (bus, subway, etc.) makes it easy to get from/to the train station.

sytelus 11y ago

You are kidding, right? Do you have any idea of how many hours of lives are lost in traffic? If you sum up all those hours and divide by average lifespan, I bet it comes out to few thousand people getting killed each day. Trains also hugely impact how much people must pay on housing. In areas with great train network, people can chose to live farther and still can avoid unreasonable commute. Just imagine what if Californians can spend their earnings on meaningful activities rather than just housing. When I visited Russia, I just began to realize how important is train network and how badly neglected it is in US. Moscow has one of the absolutely best train network anywhere - all built by Soviets. Trains comes every 2 mins, they are fast and there are plenty of routes with plenty of stops to basically go anywhere without wasting your life getting stuck in commute, finding parking and pay bucket loads of money on gas. In US, governments are extremely inefficient - no matter what party is in White House (this is not to say Russia is better but trains are something they did got right). People are always busy in philosophical issues around abortions, gay marriage, gun rights while doing 3 hours commute one way everyday in frustrating traffic never asking why government isn't fixing it for decades.

narag 11y ago
The idea of self-driving cars was only possible in the USA. In Europe it seems very alien because of the trains.
- kjjw 11y ago
  Utter nonsense. Automated driving aids have been developed for a long time by European car manufactuerers. Audi is now testing a fully automated var. Daimler just released a partially self driving truck.
  - mkempe 11y ago
    Volvo is working on it as well. They are currently running a year-long experiment with a hundred self-driving cars in southern Sweden.
  - narag 11y ago

grey-area 11y ago

The question is why? Why should the U.S. spend billions on a great passenger rail system? High speed rail is almost always a serious money loser. What are the benefits? How much money does the state road infrastructure make? What are the benefits?

peyoNYC 11y ago

Market share is misleading as high speed trains have been deployed on only a few corridors. These are expensive systems that need high volumes - in which case they work. Checking train share of market by corridor gives a better view. Regarding info from Cato or Reason, I'd take it with caution. They used to produce good research but unfortunately they seem to be driven by ideological choices more than facts. Still a good read but needs fact-checking. Last - about environmentalists: the overall impact of high speed train depends on how many people ride it. California should be a no brainer as traffic potential is huge. I wouldn't say the same of Spain (where lines are under used). Overall: don't trust the definitive arguments. Most people have hidden agendas on the high speed rail topic. From a realistic analysis of facts, you may conclude that California hsr should easily be a commercial success, therefore environmentally good, and has a good chance to be profitable if properly managed/built. Texas hsr is the same. North east has a great potential but the costs are so high that just a small deviation ends up in huge sums of money in overspent. Guaranteed commercial success but risky from a construction/financial standpoint. Other projects can be more questionable. I've participated to a review of all them for a potential investor and this is what I remember of it. Don't take it as truth, check the facts.

6t6t6 11y ago

> High speed rail is almost always a serious money loser. What are the benefits? When people make this statements is usually because they forget the cost of building and maintaining roads and highways (that is payed by all taxpayers, even if they don't use the car), the actual cost of the land occupied by paved roads and parking (almost 50% in most cities), the deaths by traffic accidents, the deaths caused by the pollution, etc... Another thing that people use to forget is that low cost flights, the main competitor for high speed train, will be less and less competitive when the fuel prices will rise again. Taking cars out of the road is always a good investment. > If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States? This article uses one fallacy after the other. Some have been answered by others; but no one who has put a foot in France, and specially in Japan, would say that High Speed train doesn't work there.

malandrew 11y ago

What is valuable and what we need more of isn't regional trains is light commuter rail. This is the rapid transit system the SF Bay Area could have had today had people had more foresight to approve it back in the 1950s. http://www.jakecoolidgecartography.com/regional-rapid-transit-bay-area.html http://www.jakecoolidgecartography.com/regional-rapid-transi... https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4080507945/sizes/l/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4080507945/sizes/l/ Imagine the San Francisco Bay Area with a commuter train system comparable to that of NYC and the great NY Metropolitan Area.