[HN Gopher] Getting High-Speed Rail Wrong
___________________________________________________________________
Getting High-Speed Rail Wrong
Author : luu
Score : 93 points
Date : 2021-05-12 19:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pedestrianobservations.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pedestrianobservations.com)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Back in 2012-2013, I did a type of competitive debate in american
| high school called "policy debate". That year, the topic (which
| we debate the full year about) involved transportation
| infrastructure. At the time, my partner and I read an affirmative
| about how good mass transit is.
|
| Randal O'Toole is the primary author of "mass transit is bad"
| style arguments used against us. It was so prolific that I had a
| counter piece of evidence titled "O'Toole is a tool" which just
| tried to character assissinate him.
|
| What is he doing still being relavent and stuff? I had judges on
| my debate circuit that apperently knew him in real life and
| mentioned at the time that he was old...
|
| Edit: for anyone that wants to know O'toole's canadian, extremely
| liberal equivilent who supports mass transit, I recommend you
| checkout the work of Todd Litman from the Victoria Transportation
| Institute. He wrote most of the evidence for "mass transit good"
| and has publicly feuded with O'toole multiple times.
| barney54 wrote:
| Did you ever try to respond to O'Toole's argument or was it all
| character assassination?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Libertarians know successful state run trains are they biggest
| ideological enemy. This is the hill they will die one.
| lainga wrote:
| > Moreover, all lines [of the TGV] are very profitable excluding
| the cost of fixed capital.
|
| Why say this? It's a big capital-intensive project. A nuclear
| power plant is profitable if you exclude the cost of building the
| reactor, but that's the problem - you can't exclude it, and
| breakeven time is a big part of cost-benefit analysis.
|
| What was breakeven time for the TGV? That would convince me more.
| swiley wrote:
| The US already has tons of rail, it's just only used for
| freight (often coal.) Maybe that's what they meant?
| moshmosh wrote:
| I'd never made the connection between the gradual shuttering
| of coal plants and freight rail, but wow, that _is_ a big
| deal. A quick search finds that coal is about 30% of rail
| tonnage in the US. A bunch more (not looking it up, but if
| you 've ever seen a train, it's clearly also a lot of what
| they haul) is other fossil fuels.
|
| I wonder how they're going to cope with (let's give a very
| lowball estimate) 40% of their tonnage tapering off over the
| next few decades. Looks like coal shipped by rail is already
| way down from its peak, and dropping fast. Looks like they
| charge a premium for intermodal shipping--may have to cut
| prices on that to keep volume up.
| timerol wrote:
| The next paragraph explains the return on capital for the
| various projects. This varies per-project and whether you
| include societal benefit or not. From a strictly financial
| return on capital perspective, the figures range from 15% to
| 4%, with the new Bordeaux-Toulouse likely to be under that.
| bsdetector wrote:
| Cars are too slow, airplanes too inconvenient, long-distance
| high-speed rail too expensive.
|
| Why not all three?
|
| Ground-effect airplanes should only take about 4x more energy
| than a car at the same speed, the track is just cement or even
| dirt, they're not useful for terrorism, no pilot needed, and they
| could even be powered electrically if they make stops every hour
| or two. You could drive onto a carrier and fly at 200 mph to your
| destination.
|
| Basically a slow hyperloop, but you don't need a vaccuum or
| anything high tech at all. I've asked about this before and
| nobody has explained why it wouldn't work - maybe it's so obvious
| it goes without saying.
|
| edit: hills could be made more flat but surely would be less
| problematic than for a train where the track must be almost
| totally flat, any small object or animal could be flown over
| maybe even trading speed for height, more energy intensive than
| high speed rail but construction and maintenance far less so. We
| can make a computer control system for F-117 but we can't control
| ground effect? These don't sound like carefully considered
| objections.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Basically a slow hyperloop, but you don't need a vaccuum or
| anything high tech at all. I've asked about this before and
| nobody has explained why it wouldn't work
|
| Ground effect is unstable and hard to control, incursions on
| the track would be very dangerous, but most obvious measures to
| mitigate intrusions interfere with ground effect flight or
| require bigger rights of way.
|
| It would be a slow hyperloop with a much bigger ground
| footprint (like classical high speed rail), less efficiency
| than classical high-speed rail, control/safety issues not
| present in high-speed rail, etc.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| If you have already have a track dedicated to the ground-effect
| airplane, seems to me that it'd always be more cost effective
| to build a railroad on that track and move more people. The
| track is the hard part.
|
| Ground-effect vehicles might make sense over water, though,
| building effectively a very fast ferry. There's a startup from
| the last YC Batch trying it. Regent:
| https://www.regentcraft.com/
| bluGill wrote:
| Wind resistance. Airplanes at altitude get a lot less wind
| resistance. Tracks also need a lot less right of way (width) vs
| ground effect airplanes which need wings.
|
| Rolling resistance is not a big deal for trains (or even cars).
| It exists, but it is small. The real issues for going faster
| for both is wind resistance. (maglev is better more for
| maintenance cost than rolling resistance - at least until we
| get to hyperloop speeds - if we ever do)
| darksaints wrote:
| It can and has worked in the past, but only over water. Ground
| effect planes over land have the problem that land isn't really
| flat, and ground effect doesn't buffer as well as you might
| imagine. Even small mounds of dirt can cause an extremely
| uncomfortable ride. You can think of it like riding in a
| massive monster truck, but without shock absorbers. You're
| basically guaranteed to get sick.
| leecarraher wrote:
| Instead of focusing on other countries successes with HSR it may
| be more applicable to look at our ongoing attempts at high speed
| rail. The California HSRA has been working toward the goal of HSR
| in california for over a decade. California has the largest tax
| revenue in the US and one of the most progressive populations.
| Despite this, they still are plagued by cost overruns, deadlines,
| and political opposition.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| Part of the problem is the insistence and cost of using
| consultants. This LA Times article from 2019 explains it pretty
| well.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-hi...
| pwned1 wrote:
| I really don't understand the argument for high speed rail in the
| US (outside of the NE corridor). There's nothing magical that's
| going to make it cheaper (see, e.g., California). The US is huge.
| High speed rail is absurdly expensive compared to planes, and
| capacity is nearly nothing compared to planes. So why is it such
| a focus of obsession? _Because it looks cool_ seems to be the
| argument that is most prevalent. But the devil is in the details.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The US may be huge. But regions within the US are not huge.
| There are at least a half-dozen regions in which high speed
| trains would make as much, if not more sense than they do in
| Europe if judged by population density and distances.
| etrabroline wrote:
| Why build a train line that only takes you where a bus could,
| when you could build an airport that connects you to the
| entire globe?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Because you want to get somewhere faster than the bus or
| plane could deliver you.
|
| Because the environmental impact of trains is, while
| controversial, unquestionably less than that of flying.
|
| Because trains should be moving at an average of 140mph or
| so, which is more than twice that of a bus.
|
| Because most airports don't connect you to the entire globe
| in a single hop, so you may as well take the train to the
| existing one that does.
| wahern wrote:
| It's chosen because airport and highway expansions _also_ cost
| many billions, and at least on paper HSR often pencils out.
| California studies showed that alternatives centered on airport
| and /or highway expansions _without_ HSR would have also cost
| tens of billions, and altogether ultimately more than a master
| plan including HSR. AFAIU the same analysis is true for the NE.
|
| CAHSR costs ballooned, but so do highway and airport
| expansions. The U.S. and many other countries have cost
| management problems with _all_ large infrastructure projects.
| darksaints wrote:
| One of the things that so many HSR enthusiasts seem to get wrong
| about HSR is expectations about non-stop trains between major
| cities. Successful systems either don't have them at all, or they
| are extremely limited. Certainly you can do non-stop trains, but
| the systems that do non-stop trains are all massive money losers.
|
| This idea is always met with extreme incredulousness about it
| because it violates their intuition. "You have to go as fast as
| possible or it won't compete well with air travel! If I have to
| stop in Merced for 5 minutes to let a handful of people on or
| off, I'd rather just fly".
|
| The problem is that those handfuls of people, the result of the
| potential travel between the cartesian product of dozens of
| cities, adds up. There are number of trade publications that have
| analyzed passenger patterns on successful systems and have found
| that the ridership exclusively between major terminal stations
| typically accounted for ~50% of total ridership, and less than
| 50% of total revenue. Smaller hops have higher prices and better
| market penetration because they aren't served by air travel and
| therefore have no competition. Larger hops between major cities
| have lower prices simply because they have to compete with air
| travel. Even in a "perfect" world with non-stop trains, HSR is
| still going to lose _some_ traffic to air travel, and they won 't
| have all of that massive supplementary revenue from intermediate
| destination travel.
|
| Unfortunately, the idea that we should build a system that isn't
| optimized for them just doesn't resonate with people. And since
| high speed rail is now a partisan issue, and those same parties
| have a sharp urban rural divide, we get two camps: 1) democratic
| voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts
| say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops, and 2)
| rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they
| would benefit from it greatly, because "socialism". And because
| of it, I believe American HSR is doomed. It will either get built
| and lose massive amounts of money, or it won't get built at all.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| > rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they
| would benefit from it greatly,
|
| It's not clear to me how a rural voter (I guess the 'voter'
| part is because these are publicly funded works) really
| benefits. Once a year vacations to the beach? Shopping trips
| where you are limited to what you can manage on foot? Visits to
| a specialist doctor?
|
| Since the sense of rail depends on regular use, I guess all
| that's left is commutes from a dispersed area to a central one.
| You have to wonder how much telecommuting will decrease the
| need for that over time.
|
| One good thing about rail is that you are allowed to do it
| piecemeal. There's bound to be somewhere that needs a point A
| to point B bullet train.
| bombcar wrote:
| A practical step that would not be excessively costly would
| be to standardize the three types of rail in the US - local
| tram, commuter, and intercity/high speed (fun fact -
| depending on your definition of high speed rail current
| Amtrak trains can hit that, as on correct track and with
| positive train control they can do 125+ MPH).
|
| If it's standardized it will be easier to make sure you can
| develop it piecemeal.
| bluGill wrote:
| Amtrak is higher speed rail. HSR needs to average 140mph -
| including stops at any station between where you want to
| go.
| darksaints wrote:
| Nobody would consider Tokaido Shinkansen to not be HSR,
| but it averages ~125mph.
| bluGill wrote:
| They should. Back in the day it was built that was high
| speed, but technology has marched on and it shouldn't be
| called high speed anymore.
| bluGill wrote:
| You are not wrong, but that is misleading. HSR needs to be
| limited stop - they need 10 km just to get up to speed. Most of
| the energy is used getting up to speed (regenerative braking
| helps but doesn't get it all back), so for short trips you HSR
| is too expensive and not much faster.
|
| That said, the advantage of rail is it stops at points in
| between. It cannot stop at every little town, but it needs to
| stop at every big city (you might even be able to do a suburb
| to downtown - the idea looks like it would work on paper but
| I'm not aware of real experience), and it the big cities are
| far enough in-between some small city should get a station.
|
| This is very complex though. There is a trade off between
| stopping time and number of people on the train. You can stop
| in each city for as little as 1 minute (plus a few more to
| decelerate/accelerate) if your train has a lot of doors making
| it fast/easy to get on/off, but those doors mean there are less
| seats so less people are on the train. Or you can have just one
| door, but now there is a long line at that door and you need to
| stop for 15 minutes at each small town. So busy lines will have
| less stops than not so busy lines - the latter need more stops
| to attract all the customers they can get.
|
| This trade off needs to be considered separately for each line.
| mcphage wrote:
| > they need 10 km just to get up to speed
|
| Why is that? Cars and airplanes accelerate much faster,
| without any real rider discomfort. If it's due to train
| hardware itself, wouldn't an assist to get the train up to
| speed work, in a fraction of that distance?
| makomk wrote:
| There just isn't that much grip between the rails and the
| train, and any change to increase the amount of grip would
| probably sacrifice the efficiency and maximum speed
| advantages of rail. Remember, we're talking about steel on
| steel contact, which has incredibly low rolling resistance
| losses but is not exactly high friction.
| bluGill wrote:
| Depends on the speed, but .7m/s^2 is a typical acceleration
| for trains. Cars can accelerate faster, and some trains can
| as well.
|
| I just redid the math - to get to 300 km/h needs 4.8km, not
| 10 that I thought. Faster speeds need more distance or
| course. Hills also impact the distance needed. You also
| need to account for same safety distance for a lot of
| acceleration applications.
| robocat wrote:
| The distance to achieve top speed is irrelevant, it is
| the time lost that matters.
|
| How much time is added to the journey for a single stop
| (including time for the stop itself, braking and
| acceleration).
| iggldiggl wrote:
| With trains its expected that you can stand up and walk
| around at any time (or in some cases even have standing
| passengers), which _does_ limit your reasonable maximum
| acceleration somewhat compared to modes of transport where
| your passengers are all seated and wearing seatbelts.
| mcphage wrote:
| You're right, that's a good point.
| bombcar wrote:
| The usual solution to this is having local vs express service
| - lines run alongside each other where there is a bumpkin
| train that stops every few miles, but every 50 or so it stops
| at a station that is also serviced by an express or even a
| high-speed stop.
| jandrese wrote:
| This is how it is supposed to work. If you are going
| someplace distant you can take the high speed train most of
| the way and then transfer to the slow regional for the last
| leg of the journey.
|
| Unfortunately this system means you need parallel tracks,
| one set for the high speed express trains and another for
| the regionals. This isn't as bad as it seems, it requires
| double the steel and concrete, but the land is the
| expensive part of the deal and even though the parcel you
| need is wider the expense is not doubled.
|
| Or you can run the high speed rail on routes that are
| optimal for it and leave the regional rail in its byzantine
| routes from the 30s that serve the locals well.
| darksaints wrote:
| I don't mean for it to be misleading, and I do agree with
| you. There is always a tradeoff between more stops and higher
| speeds, and if you're building high speed rail you do need to
| make different tradeoffs than commuter rail.
|
| That being said, I think even people that agree with that
| statement would still be surprised at the kinds of stops that
| successful systems make. For example, Tokaido Shinkansen, the
| most financially successful line in the world, makes stops in
| Fuji (pop. 245k), Odawara(195k), Anjo (188k), Kakegawa
| (117k), Nakamura-Ku (135k), Mishima (110k), Hashima (68k),
| Maibara (38k), and Atami (37k). There are three services:
| all-stop, skip-stop, and non-stop. The fastest non-stop
| service is about an 1:40 faster than the all-stop service,
| and 1:00 faster than the skip stop service. But most
| terminal-to-terminal customers still take the skip stop
| service because it has the highest frequency...enough to
| negate the speed advantage of non-stop service in most cases.
|
| When the CAHSR proposal first came out, the phrase "cow towns
| like Merced" was practically a meme. People were laughing at
| the stop in Gilroy, saying things like "why? so we can buy
| garlic on our way to LA?". Most people even thought that
| stops in secondary cities like Fresno and Bakersfield were
| entirely unnecessary. But the experts who wrote the report
| (who are fairly well regarded, btw) chose those stops for a
| reason: they are rural minihubs that aggregate a lot of
| traffic volume in areas that are too far from larger cities.
|
| In the words of an operations researcher I once worked with:
| with HSR, top speed is what sells the service, but
| acceleration is what makes the money. Acceleration minimizes
| the time loss from making more stops, and more stops means
| more money.
| sjsamson wrote:
| I agree with your post thread. A lot of people uninitiated
| in railways think of HSR as an airplanes on rails. HSR =/=
| Airline.
|
| Trains have a number of advantages, one of which is a small
| time penalty for stopping at a station relative to aircraft
| (2-3 minutes vs ~45+ minutes on average), and the aircraft
| requires a lot personnel/all-hands to turn around quickly
| (see: Southwest Airlines). A commercial aircraft is simply
| not designed for lots of really short hops in rapid
| succession. There needs to be a new preflight check,
| refueling, unload/load belly cargo, some maintenance items
| are based on aircraft takeoff/landing cycles (tires, cabin
| pressurization, etc.) Trains stopping at station and
| continuing is trivial by comparison.
|
| A rail operator wants to collect fare paying passengers
| along the route they are planning on operating, it's an
| easy way to boost ridership and revenue. It is a balancing
| act to have station stops, but not increase end-to-end trip
| time excessively. Basic rule of thumb: Does stopping add
| more riders than it costs due to the stopping time penalty?
| If the model/data say yes, make the stop; otherwise do not.
|
| And just because we have a station, doesn't mean every
| train has stop there. We can have local, limited, and
| express trains. We can passing/siding tracks at stations to
| prevent local stopped trains from blocking the mainline for
| limited/express trains. We can have cross-platform time
| transfers between different train types and destinations.
| We can have multiple mainline tracks. These things do cost
| a bit more upfront, but it's more about good planning and
| what kind of service to the public is the goal.
|
| -- The Tokaido corridor (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka) is extremely
| dense, both the Tokaido Mainline and Shinkansen line are
| effectively at capacity (which is also part of impetus for
| the Chuo Shinkansen). Running at very high speeds with fews
| stops, consumes a lot track capacity. Which is why JRs
| prefer running more local and limited-stop service trains,
| and less than "non-stop" express trains. It's what a
| capacity constrained operator should do to optimize
| operations and maximize capacity subject to those
| constraints.
|
| Likewise a California HSR program, should find a way to
| cost effectively serve cities like Fresno, Bakersfield,
| Merced, etc. as part of a larger HSR network.
| bluGill wrote:
| (separate post for politics)
|
| > democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose
| interest when experts say that there need to be lots of
| intermediate stops
|
| A few do. Based on the people they elect most don't actually
| care about high speed rail. They care about workers - the more
| the better, and even better yet if you can make those workers
| minorities. High speed rail is only a proxy for spending lots
| of money on something that gets people working, if the rail is
| never finished that is so much the better because they can keep
| paying those people to build the line.
|
| Rural voters won't benefit much. By the time they drive to a
| big city where they can catch the train they may as well fly.
| The amount of distance needed to get to the train station means
| that there isn't very much in range by rail that they are not
| better off driving.
|
| Note, there is rural voters and hobby farm voters. The hobby
| farm voters live and work in a big city, and go home to their
| small farm with a little bit of livestock to farm for fun. They
| might make money on the farm, but it isn't their day job. The
| only difference from suburban voters is they are just a little
| bit farther out. There are a lot of these voters who don't see
| how HSR will help them, even though it will once they realize
| how much faster it is to get to other cities.
| bombcar wrote:
| So write the bill to require Halliburton to build the rail
| and hire minorities to do so. Everyone gets to skim and
| everyone is happy and eventually you might even get something
| that kind of works.
|
| /sarcastic, but not entirely
| fl0wenol wrote:
| You're not ... wrong, but I can't shake your use of the term
| "hobby farm voters" which is the worst kind of no-true-
| Scotsman aspersion, it really brings the rest of your
| argument down. And what is the problem with putting
| minorities to work on the face, that it's a kind of virtue-
| signaling?
|
| It seems like that there's no inherit value in these things
| by your argument.
|
| And yet, yes, there is an issue with large infrastructure
| projects being turned into jobs programs so the scope creeps
| and they never get done-- A problem not unique to
| transportation infrastructure, but government-funded projects
| in general, as the incentives for project managers in govt
| and politicians are aligned to continuously increase scope
| bluGill wrote:
| I couldn't find a better term for those who live close
| enough to a big city to actually make use of it, while far
| enough out to look like farmers. There are some real
| farmers in this group as well.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is a major point - a high speed rail between Chicago and
| MSP would allow travel between those two points - but more
| importantly it would allow _commuting_ travel from points in-
| between.
|
| If you build the rails well, you can run both express service
| (which skips stops to maintain higher speed) and local service
| (which stops at most or all stations).
|
| I believe the way to solve some of this would be to attack it
| from multiple directions:
|
| 1. Require that future highway construction be "rail-ready" -
| i.e., leave room and have curves that are friendly to adding
| rail to the highway corridor in the future.
|
| 2. Develop local rail corridors that are "high-speed-rail-
| ready" - as a connection between two large cities is mainly of
| interest to a few, but commuter rail to the nearest large city
| is more obviously valuable. And if designed right it can be
| made for commuting but still be curved, etc correctly to allow
| higher speed trains if/when it's finally connected through.
| niftich wrote:
| Despite several flaws and uncharitable misrepresentations in his
| policy analysis, I actually agree with most of O'Toole's
| conclusions.
|
| I post a lot on here about rail, and I disagree with a lot of
| output from the Cato Institute, but the infrastructure cost of
| long-distance High Speed Rail in the US would be immense, and the
| geography of settlement and commuting patterns in the country are
| too car-oriented to take advantage of passenger-only HSR.
| Americans already do most travel by car and long-distance travel
| by air, so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier
| substitute for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but
| drastically less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel.
|
| It's no accident France runs the TGV like an airline, because
| they work the same way: you get to your destination station, and
| now what? You need to hop on public transit or rent a car like
| you would at an airport. But in Europe, a big town is far more
| likely to have public transit of acceptable quality, frequency,
| and coverage to solve the last mile problem; all but the most
| transit-webbed US cities do not.
|
| This article exposes some of the flaws and misrepresentations in
| his analysis, but then contributes its own flaws in turn. One
| example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe,
| and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but
| thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as
| "moderate-speed trains" too. Truly High Speed Rail only runs in a
| dozen corridors in Europe, and the rest of the passenger rail on
| the continent runs the gamut from decent to atrocious. Buses are
| flexible, because they can go where the roads already go.
|
| One way to get around the last-mile problem is to ensure your
| destination is likely to be transit-webbed town, or your
| destination station is very close the location to which you
| actually want to go. This sounds a lot like commuter rail -- the
| speed depends on how much you want to spend on infrastructure. In
| the US, this would mean that lines radiate out from NYC, Boston,
| DC, Philly, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, SF, Miami, Seattle, Portland...
| but not any further than an hour or two of travel. The Northeast
| Corridor is a lucky exception because you have some of the most
| interconnected cities in the US all in a convenient line.
|
| What's most frustrating is that many of both the opponents and
| supporters of HSR in the US miss the point: the point is to both
| invest in and subsidize infrastructure and programs that are
| societally useful and unlock productivity and opportunities. The
| Cato Institute would prefer a world without subsidies, but that's
| not appropriate for the sorts of high-cost functions that offer a
| major benefit to society. Pedestrian Observations would prefer
| more mobility and transit, but sometimes that transit actually
| looks like an airplane or bus or subsidized taxis, because it's
| what makes most immediate use out of the current infrastructure
| in a way that balances opex with capex.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier substitute
| for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but drastically
| less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel.
|
| Lots of people in the US fly distances in the 300-800km range
| cited in the article. So equating long-distance and flight
| doesn't seem right. Trains are no less flexible than flights
| (or busses) over any distance (obviously they can be slower);
| they only lose flexibility when compared with cars.
|
| > One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in
| Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail
| system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as
| fast as "moderate-speed trains" too.
|
| The article's author says more or less precisely the same thing
| as you've said here. In addition, the flexibility of busses is
| not the same as the flexibility of _a bus_. Yes, bus services
| can range from inter-city routes moving at 80mph to local ones
| servicing small villages. But these are never the _same_
| busses.
| niftich wrote:
| In my comparison of HSR vs. cars for <300 mile travel, the
| rail being 'drastically less flexible' means that it's
| subject to the same last-mile problem as planes are, whereas
| cars do not have this problem. Therefore the advantages of
| cars for trips like this are difficult for HSR to overcome.
|
| As for buses, the article's author diminishes the
| significance of intercity buses in Europe by making it sound
| like private intra-national intercity bus service isn't
| competitive with HSR on travel time, as if HSR were
| widespread. HSR is only present along a dozen or so corridors
| in Europe, and while within France such premium bus services
| are a relatively new phenomenon, that isn't true elsewhere on
| the continent; so across the whole of Europe intercity buses
| are both much more common than he initially suggests, and
| much more competitive vs. rail than he suggests. After this,
| he does say buses thrive in the gaps between the train
| network, complement it, and have historically been important
| for international travel because of rail fare structures, and
| on those points I agree.
|
| My wording of 'buses are flexible' does refer to the ease of
| introducing new routes (i.e. not having to build lots of
| rail), as a sibling comment correctly identified.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| >In my comparison of HSR vs. cars for <300 mile travel, the
| rail being 'drastically less flexible' means that it's
| subject to the same last-mile problem as planes are,
| whereas cars do not have this problem. Therefore the
| advantages of cars for trips like this are difficult for
| HSR to overcome.
|
| For personal travel, I think I'd generally agree. However,
| lots of US business travellers (pre-COVID anyway) would fly
| distances of 100,200,300 miles (the shuttles from Phila to
| NYC were almost always full, and that's just 90 miles!).
| These journeys have the no-car-last-mile problem, but that
| doesn't seem to have stopped the wide use of flight for
| those journeys.
|
| Granted, post-COVID, it's no longer clear how many of these
| short-haul journeys business travellers will be making in
| the next 2-10 years.
| niftich wrote:
| Business travelers take taxis from their arrival airport
| to their destination and then get reimbursed by their
| company later.
|
| They are among the least price-sensitive travelers and
| are the ones least inconvenienced by the last-mile
| problem, so their decision-making differs from those
| traveling for other reasons. (On average, they are less
| constrained by price and switching of modes, but are more
| constrained by idiosyncratic company procedures around
| travel.)
| etrabroline wrote:
| >they only lose flexibility when compared with cars
|
| Planes fly in more or less straight lines from source to
| destination, and adding a new route is just some paperwork
| and renting the terminal space. No multi-billion dollar
| investment to connect a new nearby or distant city.
|
| >flexibility of busses is not the same as the flexibility of
| a bus
|
| Again, he means the flexibility of adding new routes, not
| having the bus pick you up at your hotel.
| wahern wrote:
| > Planes fly in more or less straight lines from source to
| destination, and adding a new route is just some paperwork
| and renting the terminal space. No multi-billion dollar
| investment to connect a new nearby or distant city.
|
| One of the justifications for California HSR was that
| existing airport slots are almost saturated. Studies showed
| that airport expansion was going to cost at least as much
| as HSR. Runway and terminal expansions actually do cost
| billions of dollars.
|
| And while HSR costs have ballooned, so too would airport
| expansion costs. Perhaps even more so because much of the
| HSR cost increases are related to intransigent farm owners
| in rural areas, whereas the majority of airport capacity
| expansion work (at least on a cost basis) involves much
| more developed areas, where NIMBYs tend to be at least as
| ornery.
|
| The studies also projected greater cost burdens with
| highway expansion alternatives. Nobody disputes that
| building additional lanes on I-5 in the Central Valley is
| cheaper than building HSR in those areas. But that's beside
| the point because the dilemma isn't about increasing
| throughway capacity in the Central Valley, but expanding
| capacity _into_ and _out_ _of_ the SF and LA metro regions,
| where highway expansions are insanely expensive. Trains
| (and planes) let you offload people at various points
| within the metro region, so there 's less of a highway
| bottleneck[2].
|
| Maybe those studies were biased. Certainly many critics
| believed so. But the relative costs are much closer than
| people tend to believe.
|
| [2] Especially considering the geography.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Adding a new route is just some paperwork and renting the
| terminal space. No multi-billion dollar investment to
| connect a new nearby or distant city.
|
| Adding a new _route_ , sure. Adding a new destination, not
| so much. Are airports cheaper than train stations? I don't
| know.
| bluGill wrote:
| > infrastructure cost of long-distance High Speed Rail in the
| US
|
| Is 4 to 7 times higher than anywhere else in the world. We need
| to bring it down to reasonable levels.
|
| >commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented
|
| HSR isn't for commuting. It is for trips longer than a normal
| commute. The US is car-oriented - but I disagree with the word
| "too". HSR won't do as well (at least for the first dozen
| years) as other countries, but there are a lot of places where
| it should do well enough if we ever build it for a reasonable
| cost.
|
| > intercity buses are very widespread in Europe
|
| They also are in the US.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| After reading the article, I can't help but feel that high speed
| rail is not:
|
| . An optimal solution to a problem or
|
| . A sexy solution looking for a problem
|
| but that it's an integral part of an entire society and lifestyle
| that some people want to embrace. Serious people-mover rail seems
| to be an organic part of some countries that are different in 100
| (1000? 10,000?) different ways that people would like to emulate
|
| The arguments about serious modern rail investment look to be
| proxy arguments.
| bluGill wrote:
| HSR was new in 1965. Most people reading this were not even
| born then. Congress wants to fund something new and exciting
| not the same old thing with just small upgrades. Of course the
| next congress will want to fund something different - so
| nothing will ever happen.
| dafty4 wrote:
| Yes and that next thing will be tax cuts, thanks to the
| libertarians. #yesWeCan?
| hprotagonist wrote:
| As i understand things at a fairly high level, and particularly
| w/r/t the northeast corridor, high speed rail in the US has two
| interlinked technical facts about it that are hard to get over
| even if we can wave a magic policy wand and make governmental
| buy-in work several orders of magnitude better:
|
| - It's not that "American rail construction is just bad. However,
| this is not because rail is bad; it's because the United States
| is bad.". It's that american rail construction in the northeast
| is OLD, and we're hosed by the first adopter paradox.
|
| - from this, it directly follows that upgrading the rail for high
| speed use is HARD, because the issue is at least in part down to
| rail line geometry. AIUI, a fundamental reason you can't go 95mph
| between Boston and New York is that the railroad tracks have
| curves in them whose radii have a maximum speed without risk of
| derailment that's quite low, and to resolve this problem you'd
| have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven. There are
| other issues too, like local/freight/... sharing the same lines,
| but that's kind of saying the same thing twice: construction
| through densely populated Northeast Corridor cities is so
| impractical that it's hard to see how it could ever happen or be
| thought of as a particularly good thing if it did.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I really don't buy this oldness argument. We have to build new
| alignment you say? That makes it like greenfield elsewhere.
| Connecticut is dense you say? That's just much parts of Europe.
|
| What that leaves your argument with is that existing rail only
| makes things harder because of a sunk cost facility. Let's
| improve our bean counting then.
|
| Maybe America is one big sunk cost fallicy, being an older
| republic. Time for some creative destruction I guess.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| >Connecticut is dense you say? That's just much parts of
| Europe.
|
| those parts of Europe, let's not forget, were rather
| thoroughly flattened to a wet paste about 80 years ago, and
| were rebuilt with nice, straight, quick rail lines by people
| who knew how fast trains that weren't built in 1840 could go.
| twic wrote:
| I think you overestimate the extent to which the war
| ravaged the countryside. Some cities were destroyed. Most
| (most!) of the rest of Europe, the towns and villages,
| wasn't.
| jcranmer wrote:
| It's the cities (and their suburbs) where acquiring new
| ROW is expensive.
| allturtles wrote:
| For the most part, the cities in France that could fairly
| be said to have been 'flattened' during WWII were in
| Normandy. Paris was scarcely touched. Yet they have a
| high-speed rail network covering the whole country. Spain
| was untouched by WWII, yet they have a high-speed rail
| network. The U.S. somehow managed to build an interstate
| highway system through every major city in the decades
| after WWII without being bombed flat. The WWII argument
| seems weak.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| LGV operation started in 1981, long after any WWII
| reconstruction would've wrapped up with several decades of
| interim land development.
| jcranmer wrote:
| About your second point:
|
| This is kind of partly true. The track in Connecticut in
| particular is bad enough that you really need new right-of-way
| as opposed to fixing individual curves here and there (which is
| the situation for the rest of the NEC). Alon has favored a new
| right-of-way that's basically right next to I-95 for as much as
| possible, which minimizes the takings you need between New
| Rochelle and New Haven. East of New Haven, there's far less
| density, and it's pretty easy to make a new right-of-way
| wherever you want to.
|
| The other issue in Connecticut is that, even on the existing
| right-of-way, Amtrak isn't able to utilize the available speed
| capacity of the current right-of-way. This is due to Metro
| North intentionally slowing Amtrak trains down for its commuter
| rail schedule instead.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| I'd bet metro north saves more co2 than you'd save even by
| eliminating every plane flight between NYC and Boston.
| Probably by at least an order of magnitude.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Your second point is missing some facts that actually make the
| situation more difficult.
|
| 1. Geography and geology is tricky. Rail lines don't curve
| because the builders just love curves. There's geographic and
| geologic reasons for a lot of rail line positioning. That's in
| addition to people living/working/shopping in a place where it
| would be useful to lay track.
|
| 2. Freight lines own most of the track in the US. Amtrak gets
| to use those lines but freight has right-of-way. Amtrak must
| side track when a freight train is coming. Amtrak only has a
| few sections of the NEC as dedicated passenger track. Without
| dedicated passenger track Amtrak's schedules are all over the
| place. Freight trains have trouble all the time and passenger
| trains need to sit and wait while they fix/move the freight
| train.
| bluGill wrote:
| Amtrak can't even keep a schedule on track they own though.
| froh wrote:
| 1. old rail line positioning was also influenced by land
| ownership and existing human structures. and our know how how
| to deal with previously difficult geography has evolved. you
| may want to study "Stuttgart 21" or "gotthard rail tunnel" or
| Eurostar channel tunnel or Berlin Munich high speed track to
| get an intuition for what's possible if there is a political
| determination.
|
| 2. France and Japan have dedicated tracks. Germany has
| reliable high speed freight lines. again more than anything
| it's a matter of political will.
| cletus wrote:
| This is exactly right. It's not as simple as just upgrading
| tracks for high speed. There's only so far you can go around
| certain turns. There are also likely limits based on how
| separated the track is from the surroundings. Going 50mph has
| less of a risk profile than going 200mph. High speed rail is
| generally elevated and/or fenced off to avoid animals, peoples
| and objects that would otherwise be deadly.
|
| The UK has this problem with old rail too.
|
| European rail is quite new, probably thanks in part to the
| "benefit" of Europe being leveled in the last century. China
| and Japan have new rail too.
|
| Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are
| more concentrated. Just look at how many airports there are in
| the US vs Europe. France, a country of 60M+, has a mere handful
| of airports. So it's easier to serve more people with less
| line.
|
| Lastly, construction is (now) super expensive in the US.
|
| Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being
| economically viable in the US.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Population clustering actually follows from the way people
| travel. It's a virtuous/vicious cycle where in the US we've
| been building in ways that reduce or eliminate the usefulness
| of high speed rail while countries that have favored rail
| have been doing the opposite. The US has always heavily-
| subsidized roads and automobile travel and as a consequence
| sprawl. I think it's catching up with us socially,
| economically, and physically.
|
| In my opinion focusing on cost versus fares is myopic to the
| point of insanity. As long as we're laser-focused on the
| economic viability of rail we'll never see any of the other
| benefits.
|
| We have a responsibility to future generations to not just
| keep things the same but to make them better, and I think
| rail does that. If you look around and you dislike your
| current mode of living, hate your commute, and want to have
| access to cities, then guess what rail is a solution for all
| of that. It takes decades to see any real benefit from it
| though, which is why nobody ever goes for it.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I'm not going to disagree with the arguments you are making
| as they are valid in their own right, but I will point some
| to some important tradeoffs your post skips over.
|
| First, there is a fundamental tradeoff between location and
| transportation. Land is not a produced good, it is owned by
| landlords and its value comes from location.
|
| Transportation makes prime land less valuable and outlying
| land more valuable, thus it redistributes value outward,
| allowing people to escape from the thumbs of landlords and
| buy their own land. Eisenhower's freeway building project
| and cheap gas is responsible for the American middle class,
| much moreso than anything FDR did, as people could move out
| of apartment buildings in inner cities and buy land of
| their own, due to the improvements in transportation
| technology.
|
| For those improvements to work, you have to fan out. A rail
| line isn't going to get it done, but what a rail line can
| do is transport people to a remote place and then they fan
| out with roads. That is a good idea for redistributing
| people if an area is already densely populated and the land
| is bought in a large circle around the city. Then you hop
| on a train to take you to nowhere and there you can buy
| cheap land. But if the built up area is relatively small,
| you are better off with a network of cheap roads to carry
| you to where land is cheaper.
|
| Thus the U.S., which has always had smaller cities
| surrounded by more open space than Europe, got more bang
| from its buck with roads. But the same network of roads did
| not have the transformative effect in Europe as it did in
| the U.S.
|
| What is interesting is the shift to remote work. The
| internet has made communication another strong rival to
| location, providing another threat to land values in inner
| cities. So it could be that in the future, we will not need
| so many subsidies for transportation but for things like
| broadband, to help nurture the middle class and allow
| people to buy land in remote areas.
|
| People - especially landlords -- are very much aware of
| these dynamics, which is why historically there was great
| opposition to roads from moneyed interests, as documented
| by Adam Smith. And why roads are deserving of subsidies,
| due to all the positive externalities. In the same way,
| internet infrastructure is deserving of subsidies today.
| Whether or not rail is deserving of subsidies in the US
| depends on how large the disk is of expensive land
| surrounding cities. In the northeast, it is large, and
| that's why you see rail in the northeast. In most of the
| U.S., it's not large at all and you can buy affordable land
| without traveling too far away from work. In Europe, it
| tends to be large as well.
|
| With the internet, that is only getting better and both
| road and rail are becoming less relevant as an agent for
| the promotion of the middle class land ownership. They are
| still relevant, but I believe the window has closed on
| dreams of high speed rail connecting cities in the U.S.
| High speed internet will get the job done faster and
| easier, if coupled from a large shift to working from home.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the main (and perhaps the most important driving
| factor) - if you build a rail line from empty land directly
| into the heart of a major US city, that empty land will
| develop relatively quickly over the next 10-20 years.
|
| Instead we've done the same but with sprawling highways,
| which doesn't do much for density (and requires cars, and
| once you have a car you just use it for commuting).
| bluGill wrote:
| Careful there. It is easy to do stupid things and so not
| get that growth. A HSR from middle of nowhere south
| Dakota to NYC grand central station will get
| approximately 0 riders - the distance (all distance in
| transport is measured in minutes not meters) is too far
| to commute every day, and there is nothing else to draw
| people.
|
| I wish this didn't need to be pointed out, but there are
| a lot of stupid proposals out there. So be on the lookout
| - don't blinding support HSR: put support where it will
| be useful.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Nope, you're totally right. The devil here is entirely in
| the details.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Alternatively though if you built an express line from
| Tupper Lake to Grand Central, Tupper Lake would become
| the new Greenwich.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's a common fallacy here: that a line built from
| "nowhere, SD" to NYC serves only people from either NYC
| or "nowhere, SD". But that's never true. It would serve
| people all along the route, people taking shorter, "more
| regional" journeys. The fact that nobody actually rides
| the whole line doesn't matter.
|
| Of course, that still may not be enough to justify such a
| line, but the fact that nobody travels from one end to
| the other is not an issue.
| bluGill wrote:
| I did forget to put in the non-stop qualifier. Which is
| another stupid thing people propose all the time.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Why is it stupid?
| bluGill wrote:
| Because a big advantage to trains over airplanes is you
| can stop at places in between for low cost. It is common
| for airplanes to spend more time getting from the gate to
| cruising altitude and back down than at cruise.
|
| A train going Chicago to Minneapolis would only lose a
| few minutes stopping at cities like Milwaukee WI and
| Madison WI - both fairly large cities. An airplane could
| stop at each, but the cost of one stop would double the
| full trip time.
|
| Where a train stops vs go past is a very complex subject
| full of trade offs. However in general a train that only
| goes non-stop between two points is a bad idea. I've been
| in discussions elsewhere in this topic about that - read
| them for more info. (including those who disagree - they
| have valuable insight)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I guess I don't understand, you seem to be explaining why
| the non-stop aspect is a genuine benefit for trains.
| zdragnar wrote:
| We have plenty of proof to the opposite near where I
| live. Passenger rail was installed in several locations
| with the promise of growth that never materialized. One
| of the lines is from downtown to an airport, through a
| few miles of neglected neighborhoods that never got the
| rush of development and gentrification rail was supposed
| to bring. Another goes from the city through several
| suburbs and has had negligible impact because ridership
| is so low.
|
| People prefer not being constrained to the train tracks
| if they can drive, they prefer to not live near the
| constant blaring of horns and squealing of wheels on the
| tracks, and in these days prefer not to be stuck in a
| cabin full of potentially sick strangers for 2-3 hours a
| day round trip.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > 2-3 hours a day round trip
|
| That would be ridiculous, if it would up to 1 hour round
| trip it maybe would be more effective.
| pchristensen wrote:
| "the promise of growth that never materialized."
|
| Was it legal and politically palatable to build there, or
| in the neglected neighborhoods around it? In the USA,
| unless you're talking about actual greenfield land, rail-
| supporting development is usually illegal to build.
| sjsamson wrote:
| >One of the lines is from downtown to an airport
|
| You don't provide enough specifics about your local
| situation, but it's been long noted that airport rail
| lines underperform. The author Alon Levy's blog and
| others in the transit space have covered this. TLDR: They
| fail serve the local riders well, in an attempt to serve
| less frequent airport riders who are more likely to pay
| for a taxi/rideshare, rent a car, get picked up/dropped
| off, etc. There are often poor airport connections, like
| people movers or airport connectors, getting to the right
| terminals, etc which creates more friction and confusion.
|
| >neglected neighborhoods that never got the rush of
| development and gentrification rail was supposed to bring
|
| Rail and transportation infrastructure generally is an
| enabler for re/development and land use, but not a
| guarantee of it. Necessary but not sufficient by itself.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| If we wait until areas have high population density, it's
| harder and more expensive to build through it, and people
| don't want to fund the project.
|
| If we don't wait and want to build now, people don't want to
| fund the project due to lack of immediate ridership.
|
| Funny how we keep building roads, and expanding highways,
| while saying building rail infrastructure doesn't make sense
| because there aren't enough people to use it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Population density on the US east coast or even midwest isn't
| that far off from Europe.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Not only is it "not far off" it's locally higher. Ohio is
| more densely populated than Spain. They even both have a
| city called Toledo. The difference is the smaller city in
| Spain has a high-speed rail link to the capital with 6
| trains per day, while the larger city in Ohio has only two
| conventional trains per day, neither of which serve the
| nearest city, Detroit, only 60 miles away.
|
| In any sensible universe, the major cities of Ohio would be
| connected to each other, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh
| by high-speed rail.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan
| are more concentrated.
|
| This is commonly trotted out, and it is false for all
| practical purposes. The US does have a lot of empty spaces
| where no one lives--but no one is seriously proposing to hook
| up empty spaces to HSR. If you instead look at where people
| in the US _do_ live, it 's not all that different from those
| places. If you mapped out the major cities of the Midwest
| centered on Chicago and compared it to France, you'll find
| that the US has _larger_ cities whose distances from the
| major regional hub are roughly the same as their
| corresponding cities in France. Since HSR works in France to
| connect those cities, it should generally work equally well
| in the US to connect those cities.
| bodhiandphysics wrote:
| Part of the issue is that the Midwest isn't centered around
| Chicago. American inter city travel exists much less on the
| hub spoke style that you get in some European countries.
| While the density isn't that different, the pattern of
| demand is!
| clairity wrote:
| the only difference between the US and europe that really
| matters is the degree to which our identification with
| cars is ingrained, and therefore how that has shaped our
| development patterns. it's why we have so many large
| trucks and SUVs even though 75-95% of trips are single-
| occupancy, why we dedicate so much land to roads and
| parking, and why we care so little for public
| transporation, pollution, and transport/energy
| efficiency. it's not population density, inter-city
| distance, or patterns of demand, as these are also
| byproducts of the same phenomenon (cause & effect
| reversal).
| cletus wrote:
| That's not the only difference. People occupy way more
| space in the US.
|
| For example, the population density of Paris is about 20
| times that of Atlanta, a city ~3x as large (including the
| Greater Atlanta Area).
| clairity wrote:
| sure, and i'd posit that that's also a consequence of our
| love affair with cars. cars encourage urban sprawl
| (there's really no such thing as rural sprawl). perhaps a
| land value tax (with tax deferral until sale for non-
| wealthy primary home owners) can help us find an
| efficient optimum, something that would encourage urban
| density while not discouraging rural expanse.
| bodhiandphysics wrote:
| Don't forget the extremely large us air network!
| clairity wrote:
| that doesn't matter either. air networks in both the US
| and europe are plenty extensive.
|
| and to be clear, it's not that high-speed rail is an
| unmitigated good, but that we love our cars so much that
| any challenge to their supremacy is a literal (perceived)
| threat to our own egos.
|
| high-speed rail makes a ton of sense for the coastal
| cooridors, as well as at least a few interior ones (e.g.,
| the midwest, texas). it's probably not a good use of
| resources for a cross-continental passenger run of HSR,
| since air can more efficiently and flexibly link the
| coastal and interior intercity networks.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >but no one is seriously proposing to hook up empty spaces
| to HSR.
|
| The California HSR plan begs to differ.
|
| >Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it
| should generally work equally well in the US to connect
| those cities.
|
| Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather than
| further away cities.
| khuey wrote:
| The proposed San Francisco/Los Angeles HSR line is fairly
| comparable to the Madrid/Barcelona HSR line.
| sjsamson wrote:
| CAHSR's mainline is intended to be SF-LA via the Central
| Valley, and connect the major cities along the way. Some
| of those valley have around a 1m+ people or will grow to
| that over time, making them viable to connect. Think
| "pearls on a string."
|
| >Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather
| than further away cities.
|
| They do. People naturally travel more to places closer to
| them than further away. There is a strong correlation
| here. When you're hungry and want to go out, do you go to
| a food place 5-10 minutes away? Or a place hours away? Or
| 3 Michelin starred place on the other side of the planet.
|
| The regions targeted for HSR often have significant auto
| traffic on the highways connecting them, and short haul
| flights between their airports. HSR hits a sweet spot for
| trips that are long drives and short flights. Cost and
| time competitive, while also being more comfortable.
| SllX wrote:
| > Cost and time competitive, while also being more
| comfortable.
|
| This is only true in a vacuum without our political and
| legal environment. If you could make the project immune
| to CEQA, eminent domain challenges, and union pressure,
| then you have a much more viable railway. If you could at
| least brush off two of those three and one of them was
| the union pressure, then it might actually get built in
| the manner it was intended to be linking San Francisco,
| Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego. At this point
| we'll be lucky to get a line that doesn't share tracks
| with freight between SF and LA.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I'll point out that Fresno, CA has roughly the same
| population as Nantes and Nice, France, both of which have
| dedicated TGV lines specifically to reach those cities.
|
| Do you still think that qualifies as "empty spaces"?
| rjsw wrote:
| Don't think either Nantes or Nice have dedicated TGV
| lines.
| khuey wrote:
| A better example in France would be Bordeaux.
| bibinou wrote:
| Not really, the high-speed line was supposed to connect
| to Spain and Toulouse and the beaches of courses (it's
| not named LGV SEA for nothing).
|
| Fresno is a county seat and there's Cal State. That's it.
|
| Same in France, every local baron wanted his dedicated HS
| line, so now we got plenty but only one is profitable.
| vinay427 wrote:
| Fresno (1700/sq. km) also has less than half the
| population density of Nantes or Nice (4200-4800/sq. km).
| It's not exactly a fair comparison if the area of the
| city is far larger unless the last-kilometer transit
| seamlessly scales to last-2km transit. You can actually
| walk to a reasonable number of places, or take a bus 1-2
| km to many more, from a main station in Nantes, Nice, or
| any number of similarly-sized cities in many countries.
| rjsw wrote:
| France had plenty of airports, they just got less use once
| the TGV network expanded.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| > Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being
| economically viable in the US.
|
| It's not that sad. We have lots and lots of other low hanging
| fruit to pick.
|
| Let's even further improve fright distribution by rail. Let's
| get mass transit within our cities and their suburbs to be
| less terrible. Let's have more than a handful of cities in
| the entire country where people can reasonably live without
| cars.
| bluGill wrote:
| The US does pretty good about freight by rail, and I think
| they should be left to improve themselves for now. There
| are a lot of things they should do better, but they are
| doing okay.
|
| Most cities have terrible mass transit. Good transit is one
| where people don't have to arrange their life around it.
| Meaning it comes often, and is reasonably fast.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Why is there this asymmetrical demand that only high-speed
| rail needs to be "economically viable"? Roads don't get this
| demand: tolls and gas taxes don't even come close to paying
| for their upkeep, and nobody cares because a transportation
| network is a public good where accurately billing for upkeep
| is worth a lot less than the societal benefits.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The true high speed lines (TGV, Eurostar, ICE) start showing
| up in the '80s, when WWII reconstruction has been over for
| several decades.
|
| They upgraded their old regional lines too but that's not
| really relevant to the experience of new, 300+ km/h rail.
| cletus wrote:
| The Northeast corridor in the US was opened in 1834.
|
| My point was that the rail infrastructure in Europe just
| isn't that old and even in the 1980s you had a huge
| advantage in building for speed over the 1830s.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The state of the 1834 track has very little bearing on
| building new track in 2020, which is how every other
| country on the planet has built high speed rail.
| namdnay wrote:
| I'm not sure where you're getting your facts from, but France
| has 3 major airports (Orly,Roissy,Nice), several other large
| international ones (Geneva, Mulhouse) and many more smaller
| ones
| bluGill wrote:
| What is hard is nobody is willing to make and follow a long
| term plan. Amtrak has plans since the 1970s to fix those
| curves. Most of the places that would need to be bought have
| gone for sale since then - a bit of vision would mean that very
| little eminent domain would even be needed (not zero - there is
| always the one family that has lived in the same house for
| years). Also with the plan, you don't need to do it all at once
| - fix something every year.
|
| Amtrak hasn't had the vision to stick with the plan. Instead we
| get a new plan every 10 years or so. Sure the new plan is
| arguably better, but the old plan complete would be better yet.
| The money spent making a new plan would fix one of the bad
| curves (only one though)
| acdha wrote:
| > Amtrak hasn't had the vision to stick with the plan.
|
| I think this would be better stated as "funding" -- it's not
| like nobody at Amtrak has failed to think about the hotspots
| for them, it's just that they are in the unfortunate position
| of being expected to service a lot of [now] marginal routes
| against both very well funded alternatives, but they have
| limited governmental support for the kind of major
| infrastructure changes they need to dramatically improve
| their offerings.
|
| A completely private business could, for example, simply
| discontinue unprofitable lines or acquire long-term debt to
| fund a major capital investment but they were created
| specifically to avoid closing routes and debt is a political
| hot potato. A government service could point to greater
| societal benefits to justify funding out of general tax
| revenue but Amtrak is expected make enough in ticket revenue
| that they're perennially short of cash. A large part of the
| problem is simply that railroads have high base costs which
| can be made up in volume but their service costs more than
| alternatives because we don't subsidize rail anywhere near as
| much as highways (for example, DC to NY on train costs more
| than a bus, but I-95 isn't a toll road funded only by users).
|
| Edit: just to be clear, I'm sure that they're just as flawed
| as any other group of humans -- it's just that whenever you
| see some obvious problem holding an organization back, it's
| almost never the case that nobody there has thought about it.
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm sure some low level people at Amtrak have thought about
| it. Upper management has generally not, and thus not
| allowed the limited funding they could have to be put to
| good use over the years. A new plan after all is all yours,
| if you take the old plan your predecessor gets credit (this
| is also why new CEOs bring in major re-orgs soon after
| starting - they can't let any credit for success go to
| their predecessor).
| admax88q wrote:
| > and to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain
| swathes of, say, New Haven.
|
| This never seems to be much of a problem when highways are
| concerned however.
| bluGill wrote:
| It is harder than you think. In 1950 it wasn't a problem, but
| these days people are aware that a freeway too close to their
| house is a negative. They will support the next neighborhood
| - close enough to be easy to get to, far enough away that
| they don't get the noise and traffic.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Yeah, or a Foxconn factory:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-
| fo...
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Americans know all about highways but can't imagine
| functioning railways. So, no surprise there's political will
| to do one and not the other.
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| > It's that american rail construction in the northeast is OLD,
| and we're hosed by the first adopter paradox.
|
| The rail networks of Britan and France, just to pick a couple,
| are older than those of the USA. No first adopter paradox in
| that comparison.
| cnasc wrote:
| Asking genuinely because I'm not sure, but were Britain or
| France forced to upgrade due to war-related damage?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| France did but Britain largely did not upgrade the ROW to
| be straighter.
|
| And it's largely irrelevant anyways because true high speed
| rail (TGV, HS2, ICE) doesn't start showing up in Europe
| until the '80s, long after WWII reconstruction wrapped up.
| tpmx wrote:
| _to resolve this problem you 'd have to eminent domain swathes
| of, say, New Haven_
|
| I was a bit skeptical until I saw this user map of the
| Northeast Corridor:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1dH5vJWx6lwBlBv...
| twic wrote:
| That is a ludicrous route for high speed rail.
|
| I don't really know this area. Say you wanted to build an
| entirely new and mostly straight Stamford - Waterbury -
| Hartford - Providence alignment. Some of that would need to
| be in tunnel. But how much of that could you do on the
| surface without needing to demolish too many houses?
| jefftk wrote:
| That map is at least a little bit aspirational: it shows the
| Northeast Corridor extending north of Boston's South Station
| to North Station via "Central Station". While I would love it
| if we built
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_Rail_Link
| it does not currently exist.
| tpmx wrote:
| The main impression it gave me (be sure to toggle to the
| satellite view - then you can also verify the existence of
| tracks) is how tricky it would be to build a reasonably
| straight railroad there while also connecting the
| population centers.
|
| The route that the existing track takes is insanely
| suboptimal and seems so hard to fix considering the
| existing urban sprawl in the relevant areas.
| rustymonday wrote:
| It makes most sense to me for rails to be built in the
| interstate medians. You see this in Chicago, and could be
| done elsewhere relatively easily as its already
| government owned land. As a bonus, car commuters could
| see how much faster HSR might be than their normal
| commute.
| tpmx wrote:
| The interstate highway along that stretch (I-15) does not
| seem to have enough space in the middle for that,
| unfortunately.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Interstate highways are designed for a speed limit of
| <100MPH and have the curves to show for it.
|
| High speed rail goes well beyond that speed and needs
| much larger curves, at which point you're deviating
| enough from main roads you may as well just take a
| different path entirely.
| jandrese wrote:
| How are you ever going to achieve high speed if you are
| stopping every 10 miles for another station? There appears to
| be 8 stations in Baltimore alone.
| tpmx wrote:
| There are four tracks - that enables the combination of a
| slow local stop-at-every-station service along with a fast
| feeder service.
|
| But then the bizarre/historic track geometry ruins the fast
| service...
| machello13 wrote:
| Is that a joke? Not every train stops at every station. And
| an advantage of high speed trains is they can accelerate
| very quickly.
| tpmx wrote:
| > And an advantage of high speed trains is they can
| accelerate very quickly.
|
| They really can't.
| machello13 wrote:
| They absolutely can. They're obviously limited by
| passenger comfort as the other commenter said, but the
| difference between an Acela and a Northeast Regional in
| acceleration speed is obvious.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| They accelerate reasonably quickly, but doing so any
| faster uses more energy and also starts impacting
| passenger comfort. People would like to have a cup of
| coffee on the table without hot liquid sloshing out onto
| their laps.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven
|
| Just to pick apart that specific example, you could instead
| build a bridge from West Haven to East Haven with much less
| eminent domain, but much more complaints about the bridge being
| built.
|
| When a suspension bridge was proposed for where I-95 crosses
| the Potomac, the residents of Alexandria complained that it
| would be an eyesore and were able to get a drawbridge built
| instead of a suspension bridge.
| djrogers wrote:
| There's a lot of hand-waving and unrealistic beliefs in this
| piece with regard to costs. For example:
|
| " O'Toole looks at the most expensive few lines possible:
|
| Britain's 345- mile London-Scotland HS2 high- speed rail line was
| originally projected to cost PS32.7 billion (about $123 million
| per mile) and is currently expected to cost PS106 billion ($400
| million per mile).
|
| International comparisons of high-speed rail costs exist, and
| Britain's costs are by far the worst. "
|
| It looks as if California will exceed that cost by quite a bit
| for it's equivalent length HSR project, if and when it's ever
| completed.
|
| And how does this square with the current reality of the
| California project costs (estimated to be over $100M, even though
| it's over a decade for completion, and the budget has already
| grown >2.5x)
|
| " the official Obama-era crayon, at 20,000 km, would be $500
| billion at tunnel-free European costs, or maybe $600 billion with
| 5% tunneling "
|
| So we're gonna do the rest of the 19,400 km for only $500bn, when
| the most recent 600km is costing $100bn?
| hardtke wrote:
| A good friend of mine works for a large construction firm that
| has bid on some of the California high speed rail jobs. He said
| that for much of the work (particularly moving existing utility
| infrastructure) there are no firms bidding, or at most one
| firm. They therefore know they can jack up the price to 2-3X
| normal costs. The work needs to happen in places where there
| are literally no construction workers, and crews don't want to
| go to where the work needs to be done since there is other work
| close to their house.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Where I live, which has a large African-American population,
| construction workers that I see are overwhelmingly white and
| many of the unions are notoriously racist (and I don't know
| about the others). Just notice the people working those jobs
| around you.
|
| How much is that racism costing the US economically? Of
| course it costs the targets of racism the most: I don't have
| high-speed rail; they don't have jobs, health care, etc.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Broad generalization: Unions that existed when segregation
| was still a thing generally have a less diverse membership
| than newer unions. I've mentioned it before here, but this
| historical holdover is one reason why US unions are
| dysfunctional relative to those in other countries.
| yongjik wrote:
| At the rate things are going, I wonder if it would be cheaper to
| just tunnel through most of urban/suburban areas. Seems
| preferable to building on top of ancient railroads, dealing with
| all those rich NIMBY assholes, and forever getting stuck with
| suboptimal path.
|
| South Korea built a whole 50km terminal section of HSR in a
| tunnel[1], starting at the outskirts of Seoul. It only took
| 3.0605 trillion KRW or about 2.7 billion dollars.
|
| SF to San Jose is only slightly farther (~50 mi or ~80 km).
|
| [1] https://www.tunneltalk.com/Korea-14Jul2015-Yulhyeon-
| Tunnel-f...
| barathr wrote:
| There's a deeper issue, which is that such analyses always treat
| profitability as the key goal. This is public infrastructure --
| it doesn't need to be profitable, just meet some more important
| public goal. We shouldn't expect that the electric grid be
| profitable in providing power to rural customers (and, similarly,
| mail delivery), and providing low-carbon, high-speed, easy-to-use
| transportation to everyone is an important societal goal.
| loeg wrote:
| I think the author touches on this? France seems to include
| social value in its profitability calculations. (SNCF is the
| French state-owned railway company.)
| admax88q wrote:
| Public services also have the benefit of being connected to the
| greater tax pool. If profitability is a goal of a public
| service, it shouldn't be measured in isolation. If the service
| causes an indirect increase economic activity it will cause a
| proportional increase in tax revenue.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| Lots of intercity bus advocates in the comments; I wonder if
| those people are frequent users. I've always regretted when I've
| chosen intercity buses. They are uncomfortable and cramped, get
| stuck in traffic, and you can't properly do laptop work. I once
| took a flixbus from DC to NY to save $30 over Amtrak - what a
| terrible decision. (Riding Greyhound is an even more self-hating
| experience.) The price difference is telling: no one takes a bus
| when a train is available at the same price.
| ncmncm wrote:
| American bullet trains are hamstrung by America's world
| leadership in legalized institutional corruption. Any big-ticket,
| long-term US capital project will be first and foremost a multi-
| year conduit from the public purse to private pockets, and might
| only incidentally deliver what was supposedly paid for, at 4x-20x
| the originally quoted price. The 3x-19x is corruption money.
|
| We see this, at various times, in transit tunnels (Big Dig, 2nd
| Ave Subway), nuke power plants, the embassy complex in Iraq, the
| Wall, F-35 and other military procurement, manned spaceflight,
| and California's bullet train fiasco (mercifully killed after
| shoveling out only the first few $billions of what promised to be
| a truly massive gravy train).
|
| Solar and wind power projects seem momentarily immune to this
| process, for reasons not exactly clear. Their short terms, clear
| goals, and simple accounting may leave little scope for massive
| corruption. Corruption wants projects that deliver a steady flow
| of cash for _at least_ four years, preferably 10 or 20.
|
| There are rumblings about a new $trillion missile program,
| perhaps to take up the SLS contractors when SLS has to be
| cancelled in favor of SpaceX Starship at well below 1% of the
| price.
|
| The difference between SLS and Starship illustrates the
| difference between a program intended mainly to fuel corruption,
| and one with goals that match the label.
| anewaccount2021 wrote:
| HSR has become the infrastructure equivalent of an N95 mask -
| clung to as a culture war totem rather than something of
| immediate utility.
|
| Liberals want nation-spanning HSR but will never ride it; merely
| funding it is enough to retain the sense of victory over their
| red-state foes.
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