In the UK, there's archaeological surveys, bio-diversity/green considerations, carbon impact, political lobbying. The list just goes on and on and on.
The US, at least, is largely an empty continent. You can probably draw a line between cities and not hit many things. Plus the US love-affair with cars means you could, if you wanted to, build terminals outside major cities and rent a car to drive the last part and still conceivably run a profitable service.
In the UK, we must have our terminals in the city centres which adds so much more to the cost as we have to tunnel under and into the cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2
They offered $500 an acre. That land is easily worth $10,000 an acre, and that would have also reduced the value of the rest of their land and house. Their house is on a hill and the view is wonderful, and the county also tried to put a water tower up right in front of their house.
Long story short after a long fight a man with some pull got involved on my parents behalf, and the county ended up with some extra land (sold at a reasonable price) and the water tower was put behind a woods (from their perspective) instead, all of a few hundred feet away. It was years of stress for my parents.
It's more accurately a common law problem. European states with Napoleonic law appear to avoid the cost spiral.
> You can probably draw a line between cities and not hit many things
The empty parts are away from cities. The California and Capitol corridors are (a) prime rail routes and (b) almost contiguous megalopolises.
Germany alone has like 3 major extremely over-budget infrastructure projects I can think of.
I'm going off cost per mile to build rail and road. Even when European projects go over budget, they still clock in below the U.K.–on average–which clocks in way below the U.S. (The latter gap is best explained by institutional ineptitude.)
At least not in France. The "SNCF" had to be rescued by the French state three times since it was created in 1937. And it was created because the private companies it replaced were bankrupt. [0] (in French)
Each year the French state gives ~16 Billion Euros to the company [1] (in French)
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2018/03/19/cinq...
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_nationale_de...
"European states with Napoleonic law appear to avoid the cost spiral."
Do you have any hint of other European states with Napoleonic law that avoided cost spiral?
Asking out of genuine interest - do you have any ideas as to why this might be?
The problem isn't legal, but entirely one of political will.
Some people will have an emotional attachment to their land/homes as well. The only way for something like this to work is to spend so far above market rate that people come out ahead.
That's part of giving them fair value. It's not just the number of square inches you take, but what you did to the value of what they have left.
That's just calculating money. The real problem is time. They can tie you up in court for, probably, a decade. (IANAL, but I think a determined individual who was willing to spend money on lawyers could do something around that long.)
If you've ever been on a London commuter service you'll see they're pretty packed.
Edinburgh or Glasgow to London is a similar distance as LA to SF. Those trains take about 4 hours right now versus 8 hours on Amtrak, about the same as the 8 1/2 hours the Flying Scotsman took from Edinburgh to London in 1888.
Fortunately these Central Valley grade separations are merely expensive while the CalTrain corridor work on the peninsula is experiencing explosive growth of costs from the the complexity of grade separations because of the very tricky maze of rights of way especially in and around Redwood City: https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-exploding-cost...
Additionally, those highways typically enter cities, so stations could be built over them, often right in the city center. That does leave details about how those stations are accessed, but this seems minor since everything else has already been dealt with.
I wonder if an executive order could make it happen.
The cost of building something like that is likely to be prohibitive because you'll need to dig support pylons by the road and each and every pylon would need a ground survey for existing utilities, and so on. It adds up really quickly, even with a concrete factory on site manufacturing identical parts (which they do for tunnel building for example).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake#Oa...
So it is doable, maybe a good idea if you have the money, but I heard California is burning money like there is no tomorrow and there are no funds for such a project (maybe not true, it's just what I heard).
I must be missing something here. Surely trains have a much lower carbon impact than cars and planes do, right?
In the PRC, if the government wants to build a high speed rail line, it's getting built and F-U if you want to stop it. In the US the process is 'democratized' and every little busybody comes out to protest the construction, drag the process out, or get some variance approved for some hitherto unexpected concern.
(For one example, check out the incomplete stub at the eastern terminus of I-70 -- I don't believe the cost of the land was a major factor in that case)
The reason we don't have nice things like China does is just political will, not any legal barriers.
States have their own eminent domain powers which vary, however in general they're easy to sandbag in the courts for years, preventing the state from doing anything while the landowners argue over the money.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Declaration_of_Taking_...
Importantly those highways don't need to be free to use. The government can take land and build a for-profit railway, in conjunction with a private corporation if they want, as long as it was to benefit the public.
A major problem I have with this is appraisal prices often don't jive with reality. For example in San Fransisco houses almost always sell above asking, if the government were to step in and give the land away to a private person at asking they would be in effect getting a discount. Similarly my own home has had a lot of work put into it that doesn't effect it's appraisal price meaningfully, if forced to sell at that price I'd lose money.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-02/supreme-c...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
At this point, they don't even pretend to respect the intelligence of the people.
A common-sense change might be requiring minimum quantities of local signatures to limit the potential impact of a small opposition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Environmental_Quali...
"In one case, anti-abortion activists filed a CEQA lawsuit to try to block a new tenant (Planned Parenthood) from using an already constructed office building in South San Francisco. They cited the noise caused by their own protests as the environmental impact requiring mitigation. This lawsuit delayed the new tenancy by at least 18 months."
"Governor Jerry Brown, in an interview with UCLA's Blueprint magazine, commented on the use of CEQA for other than environmental reasons: "But it’s easier to build in Texas. It is. And maybe we could change that. But you know what? The trouble is the political climate, that's just kind of where we are. Very hard to — you can’t change CEQA [the California Environmental Quality Act]. BP: Why not? JB: The unions won’t let you because they use it as a hammer to get project labor agreements." "
Would high speed rail be that different? Not being snarky, I really don't know. I just figure that if it's very fast and/or expensive, it's probably not going to be very roomy on the inside. That Chinese train looks like it's about the same width or less than most airliners.
- More space (including the Chinese ones). While it might not be wider than a plane, it's order of magnitudes longer. So, each row has less seats, and rows are much farther from each other than on a plane.
- More room for bags and suitcases as well. There's usually no need to check your luggage, unless you have an excessive amount of them.
- No turbulence
- You can stand, walk, eat, drink, open the table, work with electronics, etc. at any time.
- No long-ass waiting time before and after. For a 8:00 train, all you need is to be able to walk onto it at 7:59. Whereas for a plane, they won't let you on unless you are present at the gate before 7:45 (the exact time depends on the airport). And not to mention the security checks.
- Quietness
- Air is better
These restrictions were added to flying one by one, boiling the frog. It can and it may be implemented for trains also.
- No need to wait in any way to out your bags or suitcases. Maybe a fast X-ray scanner where you put them in a side and pick them in the others in about 10 seconds.
- You know and can select where you want to sit precisely during the ticket purchase, unlike AmTrack.
- Due to the previous detail, you can show up to the train door even a minute before leaving without Any problem.
- All trains have a previously programmed leaving and arrival time, so there's no need to wait for traffic control in normal conditions.
With all of this, even with a train and a plane having the same travel duration, in a plane you will have to wait for a lot more of "bureaucracy" than in a train.
All of this is based in personal experiences using mid-distance trains in Spain, and the fast long-distance ones are even better and more comfortable.
We can always find something to justify putting on airs of superiority, but the fact remains that our infrastructure stagnates while the rest of the world manages to modernize. Forget the China comparisons if they are so triggering. Europe still manages public works. Individual rights have to give at some point for the good of society.
Start? The entire labor movement, the public accommodation portion of the civil rights movement, and the rest of the transition from gilded age capitalism to the modern mixed economy has been a process of reexamination of and evolutionary progress from the classic capitalist conception of properry rights. Just as, for that matter, the several centuries of evolution from feudalism and other pre-capitalist economic systems through Enlightenment liberalism to the peak of gilded age capitalism was such a reexamination of pre-capitalist ideas of property rights. And while you can conceptualize them roughly as successive and mobotonic, both of those are oversimplifications; elements of pre-capitalist patronage-oriented systems were still around past the peak of capitalism, and isolated points of reversions from capitalism to them or to purer capitalist models from their replacements occurred throughout the process and still do.
But the idea that society is sitting on some static foundation of property rights that is waiting for a beginning of a reexamination is...not remotely tenable.
(1) painfully slowly, or
(2) catastrophically, with massive bloodshed.
And while #2 often produces more rapid change considered over a short term, it also tends to be less secure change subject to equally rapid and equally bloody reversal.
It's frustrating, but I’m not convinced its solvable.
I think another factor here in the US is the government bidding process that results in driving up costs, time, etc.
Because of highways, we're already connected in ways that wouldn't even be possible with trains. It's just faster and more practical to drive the entire way, or drive to an airport and from an airport to your destination, than to add a train station into the mix. In France, you can walk from your apartment to the metro, change to the regional train, and even go international without getting in a car. This will never be possible in the US because we build cities and suburbs around the highway system.
There is plenty of room for more rail in the US because I want to get "there" faster and planes are not faster for many trips.
The interstate helped make America what it is. It created a massive westward expansion even greater than the railroads. It turned San Jose from prune and peach trees into Silicon Valley. It turned Florida from a useless swamp into Miami. It enabled the escape from Detroit that led to that city's bankruptcy. It wiped out countless communities (especially communities of color and rural farm communities) when it skipped over them in its development, or put a pylon right through a local neighborhood.
I think the history of the interstate and what it's become is fascinating. This fab promo video from the construction era shows some of the PR they used to sell it to the public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnrqUHF5bH8
No offense, but that sounds so violently American. Do you realize that most of Europe is covered by a network of standardized, multilane highways with exits and services that is much denser than the IHS?
Germany, France
You're right about the former soviet republics though, the trip to Riga and especially Tallinn doesn't look very comfortable.
...I love poking at fun at the state of Florida as much as the next guy, but come on, "a useless swamp"? You really are asking for downvotes with that one lmao
The true history of Florida is that it was abandoned by everyone from the Spanish to the US military because it is basically uninhabitable without mosquito repellent and air conditioning. Lacking those inventions, there were no investments or population in Florida of any size. It was a useless swamp.
When oil tycoon Henry Flagler was gifted a friend's property on what is now Biscayne Blvd in return for his promise to build a hotel there for the wealthy patron and her friends, Miami was born. It did not develop much further than the railroads, however, until Flagler's railroad was lost at sea during the Galveston Hurricane and never recovered financially. It's now known that if the Florida Overseas Railroad had operated for 100 years, it still wouldn't reach profitability. Transportation to and from Florida (other than by boat) was a fantasy propped up by oil money. There was still no serious business development. Key West was the capital of Florida for 100 years, if that tells you anything, because it's a port city with better access to the rest of the world than anywhere else in Florida.
What changed all of this was the interstate system. For the first time, Americans had both cars and somewhere to take them. Jackie Gleason famously semi-retired to Miami only to wind up ruthlessly promoting it on a weekly TV show where he encouraged Pennsylvanians and New Jerseyites to leave their snow-covered driveways behind and come down to sunny Florida. Even Disney World's location was selected by Walt because of its easy access to the interstate, meaning guests would come from many states to visit.
Without the failure of the railroad (and its subsequent rebuilding as a freeway) and the connecting interstate to bring people to Florida, along with the charm and influence of Jackie Gleason, Miami would not have become The Magic City -- a name it gets from being the only city in the US which went to "City" status in one step, without ever being a town or settlement or any other geographic designation prior to that. There would be no Disney World. And Miami would not have become the Latam capital that it is. It is, after all, part of US 1, the very first (most important?) of the interstates. To this day, all three of the major north-south routes in the Miami area parallel the original US 1, which still exists in many places, places occupied by about 5 million people. All of that happened because of the interstate.
It's quite something to see an alligator from your car, I can tell you that!
Tldr the americans interstate system is nothing more than a copy of the german autobahn... And was never something unique.
Japan eh?
The idea definitely germinated in the Autobahn. The proof is in the pudding. (I just love that expression.) The US used its scaled interstate system to achieve a range of product and population distribution that was unprecedented. It also clobbered passenger rail in the process. Conversely, Europe, not having a well developed interstate (would need to be inter-country to even scale to a few US states), did not develop or extend its road system in the way the US has. Instead, it built trains.
It's not a matter of one is better than the other. Each one is better for the countries involved because of their size and geography.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/449781/europe-eu-28-time...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_E-road_network#/...
If we're talking about all motorway style roads, there's some additional roads in the US that qualify: 67,353 miles or 108,394km[2].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_highways_in_the_Unite...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highway...
[2]: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2017/h...
It’s even standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_E-road_network
That sounds more similar to the US Numbered Highway system than it is to the Interstate Highway System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highway...
The Interstate Highway System is a different system - entirely controlled-access motorways, with a minimum of 4 lanes, divided, and no at-grade crossings.
As someone who actually just finished a month trip from eastern Canada to the Yukon and back, and drove almost the entirety of the trans Canada highway, it’s laughable compared to the US road infrastructure.
There are large sections that are 2 way single lane highway.
There are parts of this “highway” that slow to 40km/hr as you drive through a small town.
I mean I’m glad it’s there, but I’ve also taken long road trips through states and found the interstates highways to be a big step up in quality.
While not part of the Interstate system, it's of course connected. The road is quite expensive and the tolls make so much money for the State of Florida that they don't need to charge income tax or corporate tax. Pretty amazing.
I wouldn't trade our Interstate for anything, either and anyone who says that the roads outside of Paris are anything like US interstates just hasn't been on the latter. Anyway, I also love European trains and have spent lots of time on those. The benefits of going from Métro in France for a day trip to Belgium, then back to Paris in time for dinner is just fabulous. No car. No luggage. That is simply not happening in the US.
Here's a random bit of French motorway, not radiating from Paris, and a random bit of interstate.
I don't see any difference.
I love your definitely non-random town selection in the US. Excellent. My comment was aimed at the overall level of standardization and features of the American interstate, as well as its early and pivotal development in our country's history. That's all. It was not a slight at anyone else's roadways, however exceptional.
Any discussion on reallocating some land or dollars to alternative transportation is immediately rejected by the car dependent majority. “Why should a portion of gasoline tax go toward public transportation?” “Bike lines increase traffic!” “The new development would change the neighborhood character!” “Add more lanes!”
This is absolutely possible to do in the USA. When I worked with an engineering team in Copenhagen I did it several times a year. I don’t even live in NYC.
Even domestically I can take the train from my West Coast city to the airport, fly and then take the train to my family in the Virginia suburbs.
The Chinese probably have some funky calculation that shows it makes the country that much more efficient.
For reference, it takes 4.5 hours to travel from one end of the Netherlands to the other by train. China is 231X larger.
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/neth...
We could do much more with our existing rail lines if the will was there. I maintain that we should "nationalize" the rail lines (the literal rails and whatnot) and invest in making it safer and faster. Not maglev, but at least have passenger trains run at a decent clip and not have to be sidelined for freight.
https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/mandatory_spend...
Ah, well, not overlaid, not to scale, but nonetheless:
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/guides/tipsheet-pentagon-...
tl;dr
Military & Security Spending
In fiscal year 2015, Pentagon and related spending will total $598 billion, accounting for 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending. That's roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined.
Peanuts!
We don’t get shiny trains, but we might have a more stable form of government?
https://abcnews.go.com/International/slideshow/stubborn-nail...
1. Eminent domain and generally-high construction costs make the initial time and money outlays exorbitantly high, resulting in projects never getting off the ground or having to compensate with much-too-expensive tickets
2. Even if you get to the middle of another city, having to rent a car to get to where you need is a pain. It's easier to drive from Dallas to Houston in a car, because you have a car at the end of the trip. Only some cities have fast public transport; the rest are so big it's hard not rent a car or Uber everywhere, both options are expensive and time-consuming.
3. Trains likely take more time than flights for the mid-to-long distance journeys planes are good for.
4. A cultural lack of interest in passenger rail. It's just not a part of the culture, and is seen as weird/enthusiast thing to do, unlike in Europe, India, or China.
Moreover a rail attendant/engineer for a long haul trip cannot be back at home to family at the end of the day, for a transcontinental flight attendant or pilot it's possible, so the labor pool is meaningfully different, and supply and demand is a thing.
That would be problematic for some long distance train connections in germany as well (north-south connections), but they just schedule around that: attendants change mid-journey as needed.
You don't need attendants on rail at all - what is there for them to do? For flight you need them to oversee preparing for a crash trains should get this failure mode should be designed out - which does imply doing the regular maintenance and using good safety systems. Just give a small discount to anyone with current first aid/CPR and you can be sure there are more than enough regular riders to take care of the remaining issues.
Even if you do decide you want attendants for some reason, train should stop not less than once an hour, which means the crews can get off the train after 4 hours and staff the one back home. (I don't believe freight rail shouldn't do the same, but they have different operations from passenger rail such that more than an hour between stops might be reasonable)
Note that if the train really is going through the middle of nowhere at one hour you just pick a random dot on the map and grant it a station just to get your stops. The cost to stopping a train is less than 5 minutes for the full trip (this adds up if you stop every few km, but when it is once an hour it isn't a big deal)
Not true. You need people manning the cafeteria car, cleaning the bathrooms, checking tickets, etc.
>train should stop not less than once an hour
The Southwest Chief goes from San Bernardino, CA to Albuquerque, NM in 14 hours. It makes 8 stops along the way, inclusive of the endpoints. Your point here still largely stands, but these long haul trains most certainly do not stop at least once an hour.
Best practice is to not have them.
> cleaning the bathrooms
Do it at the end of the line when the train is stopped.
> The Southwest Chief
Amtrak is a bad example for anything. They are running tourist trains, and should follow the practices of cruise ships not modern railroads.
So no food options on a 14 hour train? The train's losing a lot of captured audiences there and people like to... eat. In that time the average US person eats at least three meals, you simply can't pack that much, especially for a family.
> Do it at the end of the line when the train is stopped.
Ever been to a music festival and looked at the toilets at the end of the day? Now imagine you're in a semi-airtight tube with that for 14 hours.
> Amtrak is a bad example for anything. They are running tourist trains, and should follow the practices of cruise ships not modern railroads
Have you ever taken one on the East Coast? They are not tourist trains, they're commuters and travelers.
As for food, get off at any station and eat.
Yes bathrooms beed to be cleaned. However that is one person who cleans them between 2 stations and then nobody for the next station, and someone the station after. (This is an example, the real way to handle it might be different )
* Check passenger tickets
* Observe the cars & make sure people aren't breaking rules, etc
* Serve food/drink if applicable (e.g. for business class)
And so forth. This is how the KTX and Shinkansen work, and they know what they're doing.
Checking tickets can be done by not allowing anyone on the platform. Or world best practice is random checks and large fines if you are caught without a ticket.
Breaking rules is tricky. There is some need for that, though there are options, though in the end I will grant you this.
Trains should never serve food or drink. Passengers can get off the train at a station when they need that, and get on the next train. Space used for the food and drink is space that could be used for more seats. There is a reason all railroads have been trying to do away with food and drink service. It is considered bad practice everywhere.
> There is some need for that.
I see.
> Trains should never serve food or drink. Passengers can get off the train at a station.
There aren't going to be stations all across Nebraska or what have you. And even if there were, stopping repeatedly would defeat the purpose of high-speed rail. All that time speeding up and slowing down starts to add up very quickly.
It doesn't take long to unload and reload a modern train. France and the US do bad, but there are better examples where it can be done in a minute.
I also hear funny arguments (in my opinion) about why high speed Rails are a bad idea. Oh it's too expensive. Oh it is ok for countries like China because they have lot of people etc etc. Excuses. I thought we like choices as Americans. Right now, if I don't want to drive, my only option is to fly mostly in a shitty plane cramped up with strangers on a 4 hour flight. I would gladly trade that with a train even if that takes say an additional hour or so. Are Amtraks the best we can do America ?