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.
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.
The U.S. has essentially stopped building urban interstates since the late 70's, when opposition from residents became too strong to ignore. I don't foresee this changing in the near future.
My understanding is that construction costs in Europe are rising as well due to (among other things) increased use of tunnels in urban area due to opposition from residents.
I know the popular Western image of infrastructure development in China is jackbooted thugs forcing farmers off their land, and there's some of that as well, but most people are reasonably happy with the compensation they get. The Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev project (below) is also an instructive case study of an ambitious rail project that was cancelled largely thanks to (sadly unwarranted) public concern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai%E2%80%93Hangzhou_magl...
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...
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?
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.
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.
The above isn't a perfect answer to all situations, but it helps a lot.
The rail solution to that would probably be a tunnel. A tunnel is a cheaper affair with just two tracks than if it has to be wide enough for two tracks and six to eight highway lanes.
In any case when you start building HSR it becomes progressively harder to eke out savings and the highest come from urban area speedups. Going from 50 to 100MPH cuts a lot more time than going from 150MPH to 200MPH. And the former simply doesn't work in the median of a highway.
But then the bizarre/historic track geometry ruins the fast service...
Rerouting so far has been a headache; in New Haven-Boston where the tracks are so curvy new tracks have to be built, the FRA proposed going through entirely different population centers (the geography of the existing coast line is very challenging). This has resulted in an interesting fight where people want the train in their town, but also do not want the impact of newly constructed tracks through their town.
They really can't.
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)
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.
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.
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.
And then in the 1960s Dr Beeching’s cuts closed almost half the rail network.
The only new high speed railway in the UK opened in the 90s to connect London with the continent, I.e. Eurostar
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Do you still think that qualifies as "empty spaces"?
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.
For example, the population density of Paris is about 20 times that of Atlanta, a city ~3x as large (including the Greater Atlanta Area).
I’ve always operated under the assumption that there is massive selection bias in the United States for people who like more personal space. Never considered it was part of car culture.
in LA, outside of a very few of the oldest core districts, even our supposedly sleepy neighborhood streets are often 40+ feet wide (note that cars are typically 6-7 feet wide), with 15 feet of public easement, and 15+ feet of mandatory setbacks, so urban land use gets out of whack real quicklike that way.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
This puts the time loss to stopping a train at 3-17 minutes.
(I live in the town that had the first rail line in Australia.)
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.
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.
The reason rail works beautifully in other countries is that you can get off the train and walk to useful destinations, even if where you disembarked isn't where you live. Shinkansen in Japan have tons of shopping, nice restaurants, and hotels all within a block or two of the station. So there's a reason for non-residents to stop as well as residents. And because everything surrounds the station there's no point for residents to go anywhere else.
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.
That would be ridiculous, if it would up to 1 hour round trip it maybe would be more effective.
The other line (running from downtown to the airport) was also a total of 1 hour 30ish minutes including bus from my house to the terminal, then rail down to the airport. It otherwise was a 30ish minute drive, tops, and driving is what almost everyone chose to do if they had the car to do so.
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.
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.
They upgraded their old regional lines too but that's not really relevant to the experience of new, 300+ km/h rail.
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.
In any sensible universe, the major cities of Ohio would be connected to each other, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh by high-speed rail.
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.
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.
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.
This never seems to be much of a problem when highways are concerned however.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-fo...
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.
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.
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.
- 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.