It depends on what metric you use. The US freight rail system is the envy of the world, for example.
The reality is that HSR isn't cost-effective if the trip takes more than about 5 hours. When you superimpose that time limit on the US, there's rather few viable HSR routes. A Chicago/NYC run is at that very margin of viability--and compared to most European countries, that's a longer trip than travelling from one border to another. It's quite easy to set up routes in UK or in Germany that hit all of the major cities in fairly short order, but that task is impossible in the US. Especially grating is the lack of collinearity between major cities; the Midwest in particular ends up having to be a star topology, since Chicago-X doesn't include multiple cities, and there's no route useful enough to be worth bypassing Chicago.
Can you expand on that? It's not obvious to me.
* Airplanes travel about twice as fast as top-speed HSR. By 5 hours, even assuming generous airplane penalties, there's no speed advantage to HSR.
* For business travel, you've already lost the entire working day at that timepoint, so downtown-to-downtown isn't as much of an advantage anymore.
* You start to have to have nasty scheduling times for intermediate stops. Having to disembark at 3:00 AM is not going to be conducive to ridership.
* Sleeping cars and full-service dining start to become necessary around that point in time, and that's really going to eat into your operating costs.
I drove the number of 5 hours largely on the meal concern, but it does seem that most planning exercises tend to profitability wall closer to the 3 hour mark.
With rail you do get the benefit of landing in the middle of the city rather than an airport 30 mins from city center, but it’s still far less expensive in both time and money to fly when the trip exceeds about 4 or 5 hours.
In other words, the 5 hour rule of thumb predicts that a modern system where the coastal cities were densely connected and there were a few money-losing lines that crossed unpopulated regions would be wildly profitable.
State-of-the-art high speed rail (like in China) would be even faster, and make even more sense.
And Chicago/NYC is the "easy" connection. Atlanta, Texas Triangle, and Florida are simply too far away, let alone trying to reach across the Plains to hit Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas en route to LA/SF.
By my count, a NYC-EWR-PHL-HAR-PIT-CLE-TOL-SBN-CHI train would directly serve metros with ~50 million people (and indirectly serve much of the rest of the northeast and midwest).
Sure, you can fix issues with tunnels and bridges. But that doesn't come cheap. And what is by far the most expensive portion of the line is the part that's necessary for any sort of traction, which greatly increases the chances of the entire project being a white elephant (keeping in mind, again, that even in the best-case scenario, you're still at the very margin of being able to run a profit). The economics look worse than the Turin-Lyon HSR, which is already criticized as an expensive, unnecessary boondoggle.
I love trains, but I disagree. Trains outperform cars and planes in regional contexts. Cross-country rail, if it’s maintained, needs to be explicitly subsidised. Given voters in the middle of the country prefer to scrap their regional transportation infrastructure, I—as a coastal taxpayer—am fine with that.
Anyone taking a long distance train in the US is doing it out of nostalgia or out of contrarian quirkiness or just for the tourist value of it. We have an amazing interstate highway system and buses that run everywhere — yet the only people that take buses do so because they have no other choice — they would all rather fly than be packed on a bus for 12+ trips. I can go to Tokyo in that amount of time, but some people long for the ability to enjoy that length of trip to go from New Mexico to Illinois?
We should be making air travel better, not dwelling on 19th century nostalgia. However, When it comes to commuter-level travel, such as Sacramento to San Francisco or similar types of trips, then certainly rail is a great option because the economics make sense.
The other problem with trains is that as population and economic centers shift, it take years before train systems can respond — you have to actually build more track to change the system. Airplanes can change routes anytime they want (regulatory approvals notwithstanding.)
Even in Europe where trains are icons, try taking a train from Marseille to Geneva. It’s an 8 hour trip requiring two connections. It’s a 45 minute flight at a similar cost.
No normal person is going to chose an 8 hour train ride over a 45 minute flight. Even with heavy subsidization of trains by the French government, the costs are still almost identical. If you remove the subsidy, long distance trains quickly become economically ridiculous compared to airplanes.
If you were to remove the huge taxes on air travel, it would be even cheaper.
No business traveler going from LA to Chicago is going to waste days on a train if given the choice. It’s progress in my mind to eliminate transcontinental passenger trains. We should be looking up and not back.
https://www.google.com/maps?q=marseille+to+geneva&oe=UTF-8&h...
Considering airport transit/check-in time, that makes it pretty competitive with taking a short plane trip.
Looking at it now, there is a direct Lyria train that takes 3 and a half hours.
But still, a 45 minute flight versus 4 hours with a connection on a train at a similar cost..
Airports are usually outside of the city, train stations are usually inside the city, that is a big deal worth a couple of hours. Geneva airport is a bit more convenient, but if you are coming from Lausanne, it’s still an hour.
While I’m sure you could take that long and transfer that many times, I see a direct 3.5 hour trip for €65
You can’t really compare train travel in the US to that of Europe. The US is gigantic in comparison, Amtrak doesn’t own many of the rails they use and get delayed as a result, and airport security is atrocious to say the least.
If you’re looking at the total time to fly, getting to the airport early, going through the funhouse of “security” and then waiting for your luggage, I would imagine it’s not just 45 min.
I would also add that there is this really large mountain range that divides the heavily populated West Coast from the rest of the continent. Anyone who has ever driven on I-90, I-40, I-10, or I-8 between can tell you just how large it is. The lowest pass I can think of is ~4000 feet. There are a few European rail routes that go that high, but there are zero bullet trains that do.
The irony is, the Rs collectively are the beast, and if we were honest we'd see that their strategy is actually Feed the Beast all the way. Redirect public money to private profit.
If we tax the rich to pay for the poor, should we tax the rich schools o pay for the poor schools? Why should I subsidize Harvard?
Well said. I've been saying a form of this for years (probably not as articulately as you), but I've noticed recently that more and more people seem to be getting it. This is a good thing, because once enough people understand this is what they are about, then it will become less effective.
Had a long talk with one of the conductors while on the trip. We discussed the remarkable pattern that the Republicans follow: starve everything they don't like (or that they want to privatize so they can pocket the money), then use the subsequent difficulties and failures and budget shortfalls of the starved agency as proof that the agency can't function and deserves being shut down. They do this with Amtrak, they do it with the State Department, they do it with public schools, they do it with state universities, with healthcare, with prisons, with everything they want to privatize.
Funny, they do this with minorities too. Systematically deny them, over many generations, a good education, decent healthcare, safe neighborhoods, ability to vote, and economic opportunity, and then blame them for being uneducated, unhealthy, unsafe, frauds during elections, and for not contributing to the overall economy. Funny how the Rs' playbook is the same everywhere you look.
As for Amtrak, all the transcontinental routes are in jeopardy, the conductor told me. It's only a matter of time before they're gone.
No other civilized country in the world has such lousy transportation infrastructure. Especially trains. The U.S. should have bullet trains going everywhere, but no.