Trains also hugely impact how much people must pay on housing. In areas with great train network, people can chose to live farther and still can avoid unreasonable commute. Just imagine what if Californians can spend their earnings on meaningful activities rather than just housing.

When I visited Russia, I just began to realize how important is train network and how badly neglected it is in US. Moscow has one of the absolutely best train network anywhere - all built by Soviets. Trains comes every 2 mins, they are fast and there are plenty of routes with plenty of stops to basically go anywhere without wasting your life getting stuck in commute, finding parking and pay bucket loads of money on gas.

In US, governments are extremely inefficient - no matter what party is in White House (this is not to say Russia is better but trains are something they did got right). People are always busy in philosophical issues around abortions, gay marriage, gun rights while doing 3 hours commute one way everyday in frustrating traffic never asking why government isn't fixing it for decades.

vs a couple of hundred in train incidents.

Passenger rail is a public good, just like tax-funded public roads (which also don't make a profit, by the way.) Both are necessary for an effective and fully functioning transportation system.

>Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile.

This is largely due to an increase in rural car ownership since the 60's and the closure of unprofitable rural lines. The profitable Tokaido Shinkansen's ridership continues to increase, with 75% of passenger trips between Osaka and Tokyo using the line. The Shinkansen between Tokyo and Hiroshima, which is a comparable distance to that of LA to SF, carries more than half of the passengers between those two cities. http://www.jrtr.net/jrtr48/pdf/f06_Tak.pdf

It seems to me that California High Speed Rail will have the greatest impact on medium distance trips where it is too far to conveniently drive and not cost effective to fly. For example, it may become more practical to commute between the central valley cities the Bay Area.

- increased throughput compared to highways due to lower volume per passenger (something the US is trying to achieve with carpooling lines),

- increased reliability (there are no train-jams),

- increased passenger convenience (no need to look for parking or do maintenance on the train you ride),

- increased passenger productivity (you can work or read on a train),

- ease of transition to green source of energy.

Advantages of the car over the train:

- greater flexibility (generally roads offer denser network than railways, even in Europe or Japan),

- car is much more convenient for families with children.

I love trains. I love driving. I find that the latter is much more fun and convenience in places where the former works well. San Francisco's 101 could be one of such places if Caltrain was more like SBB.

EDIT: one more important benefit of the train:

- increased safety (much fewer fatalities per passenger; also no need for a designated driver when you go to a party).

How so? Kids can not travel in cars alone because they have no license. Kids can travel in trains alone.

And cops are common to pick up younger kids which are around on their own because it is so unusual

Putting a kid on its own on a train would be absolutely unthinkable.

Parents can't even let their kids walk to school alone. I seriously doubt they would allow their kids to ride a train alone.

This said, helicopter parents are real. I've ridden on amtrak many dozens of times, but never saw an unaccompanied child.

Meanwhile round here in London children get free bus travel, so it's very common to see them on local buses, and sometimes trains (tends to be wealthier kids on trains).

``Ding dong Due to planned maintenance/a defective signal/ a computer error/ a tree on the tracks (or a leaf, or snow)/a collision with a person no connection is possible between Utrecht Central and Amsterdam Central.''

Generally you can take a detour, or busses will be employed to ferry people (after several hours usually), but it's not a very uncommon situation, I'd say we have a really major jam about 2-4 times a year, hard to judge. Still prefer the train over the car, but when I need to go to the airport to catch a plane I won't risk it.

Also, our main rail maintainer, train provider, and the Gov't officials involved are a special kind of screw-up. So it might be a whole lot better if you can get the right people in charge.

Are you joking? Utrecht to Amsterdam is a local train. That's like saying that CalTrain is frequently delayed, therefore we shouldn't build any high-speed lines. Appels en Peren.

http://www.bueker.net/trainspotting/map.php?file=maps/french...

(a more detailed map can be found on the website of RFF, the agency that runs the network: http://www.rff.fr/cartes/pdf/carte-reseau-2011-medium.pdf)

Exactly, and let's not forget the ongoing strikes in France, very common among SNCF employees (who are akin to civil servants and go on strike at least a dozen times a year). If you job depends on it, you are screwed.

We screwed it up exactly because the political obsession with creating a more Americanised version of capitalism, partially forced down our throats by the divide and conquer strategy of the EU.

There are cases for high speed trains, but even in Japan what they are doing is stretching it - nobody takes a train from north Japan to south Japan even if it's possible. It is just too expensive and takes too much time to be actually worth it.

So, you take the train despite having a cheaper and faster option, and you're asking us why the trains are needed? We should ask you why do you use the train, if the planes are so much better.

Yes, because highways are free, require no land, never go through places where people live (/self warily eyes the massive elevated freeway overpass system lurking near my home...), and never have congestion.

With the exception of "trains aren't good for all distances", none of your arguments make much sense. They apply equally to all forms of mass transit.

A single car accident does not block the whole highway usually. For trains, it's very much likely it would or seriously delay the following trains.

As for the land part, sure, highways take lands too, but they don't have to be only in straight lines and they usually have to accommodate with the local populace. Numerous highways make detours around mid-size cities, which is simply impractical with trains designed to be on linear tracks as much as possible.

> With the exception of "trains aren't good for all distances", none of your arguments make much sense. They apply equally to all forms of mass transit.

Take this one then. In France all TGV lines converge to Paris. Try going from Lyon to Bordeau, and you are fucked, you need to go up to Paris and then down to Bordeau, which is utterly stupid. Either a car or a plane trip is faster. Japan is slightly better in that regard simply because all cities are on the coast. For large surface the amount of lines you need build is just not worth the investment.

Isn't that just because traveling from Lyon to Paris or Bordeau to Paris is far more common than traveling from Lyon to Bordeau. No one is saying that trains should replace all other modes of travel, just that they are useful for high traffic routes.

This is very much post 9/11 though. It was not as much of an hassle before that.

I can't tell if this post is serious, or just trolling.

My god, socialism. Building high speed rail are they? The fiends. I bet they spend all night twirling their extensive mustachios wondering how to destroy the economy with high speed rail projects.

Clearly there has been a massive long term trend towards increasing dominance of the car over the last sixty years, but there has never been any expectation that high speed rail could reverse that trend - after all, the vast majority of journeys and of journey miles are not between cities, but everyday local transport, which has nothing to do with high speed rail.

The benefits are really to do with bringing city centres closer together, to be able to get on a train in London and arrive in Paris (220 miles away, and across a sea) within two and a half hours, or in Manchester (170 miles away) within an hour - the latter is the subject of the next high speed line project in the UK.

It would take four hours to drive London to Manchester, on excellent motorways, and an hour would hardly get you from the city centre to the start of Heathrow airport security. Having another city within an hour of two of hassle free travel just alters fundamentally the sense of distance between those cities. Bridge building is also often not profitable, but has a long term effect on interconnectedness and the development of the area around.

Plus I have a BahnCard 100, which allows me to use the whole German train system for one year. Fast and slow. local public transport and ICE. That beats the alternatives easily.

Nice! How much does that cost you? Also, why would you have that? (Those are really expensive)

4090€

LOL. French here. I am not sure where you get that impression, but TGV lines cost dozens of billions of euros to be built, and the ROI is calculated in 30-40 years time, so saying the "TGV is highly profitable" is a pure lie, because we don't know in 40 years if people will still take it as much as now. On top of that, the SNCF (public company operating the TGV) is a sponge debt and if it were not for the ongoing government spending to keep it alive every single year with huge cash injections, it would have disappeared long ago.

Yeah "highly profitable", hey.

I'm of the opinion that good infrastructure should not be turning a profit. If it were profitable out of the gate you would just let private enterprise build it. The reason you get the state involved is because good infrastructure like high speed rail is a force multiplier on the effectiveness of everyone around it, even when it isn't turning a profit in and of itself (and usually you get the best societal value out of these things when they are a loss leader, and tickets are not prohibitively expensive...).

You want a high speed rail system in California so that hundreds of thousands or millions of workers could stop spending significantly more combined time and money on the much more inefficient road network when it comes to commuting. It would be a net positive in less need to maintain over-capacity highways, less car deaths, less anxiety and stress from the traffic conditions, and more workplace mobility along the rail lines.

This is absolutely true. I live a distance from Toronto that can be covered in about 40 minutes of driving, but the traffic jams in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) are absolutely insane, and as a result it is not uncommon for this 40 minute trip to take 1.5 to 2 hours, with a random but not infrequent chance that it will take 3 hours instead, based on an accident.

A study in 2013 (http://www.canadianbusiness.com/economy/the-end-of-gridlock/) found that gridlock was costing Toronto $11 billion CAD every year. That's just Toronto, and says nothing about surrounding communities. The cost to Ontario as a whole has to be in the tens of billions annually. There's no way that the agencies that build and run public transport in Ontario will earn billions of dollars in annual profits from it, but that's not the point - the point is to create public infrastructure that generates a healthy economy which does return money to the public purse in the long run.

Why shouldn't we criticize it ? Ever read Bastiat ? The money you spend somewhere is money you don't spend somewhere else. Wouldn't that be better to spend those billions in better schools, better hospitals, better metros, etc ? The choices you made have long ramifications in time and billions do not come cheap.

I've gone through way too many debates on the costs and benefits of free public roads, and I've argued from both sides. Be critical - just don't be hypocritical (which a lot of people are when they make a false dichotomy between the value and feasibility of rail vs road).

It strains belief that Federal rail service could similarly survive without infusions from general revenue.

If governments don't tax carbon. We'll be toast.

The exact breakdown from DfT and Network Rail are easily accessible on gov.uk.

When people make this statements is usually because they forget the cost of building and maintaining roads and highways (that is payed by all taxpayers, even if they don't use the car), the actual cost of the land occupied by paved roads and parking (almost 50% in most cities), the deaths by traffic accidents, the deaths caused by the pollution, etc...

Another thing that people use to forget is that low cost flights, the main competitor for high speed train, will be less and less competitive when the fuel prices will rise again.

Taking cars out of the road is always a good investment.

> If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?

This article uses one fallacy after the other. Some have been answered by others; but no one who has put a foot in France, and specially in Japan, would say that High Speed train doesn't work there.

http://www.jakecoolidgecartography.com/regional-rapid-transi...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4080507945/sizes/l/

Imagine the San Francisco Bay Area with a commuter train system comparable to that of NYC and the great NY Metropolitan Area.

How much money does the state road infrastructure make? What are the benefits?

(a) Japanese HSR. It started in 1964[1]. Is anyone surprised that it lost 50% of its market share to cars if cars were literally at the verge of becoming popular when it started? Japan is a huge car country. The relevant statistic here is that an average Japanese does 25x the rail kilometers per year an American is doing[2], yet has less car km per year[3]. They are second only to Switzerland in that statistic. Japan's railway companies are profitable, both as HSR[5] and local transport in big cities[4].

(b) Rail in Europe: Why are two countries picked out and then their success is measured by the market share in all of Europe, including the severely underdeveloped East? Europe is a big and diverse place too.

(c) "some environmentalist don't like it either" - I really don't see the relevance there.

The freight train system in the US is a good point - IMO Europe and Asia should take it as an example. I still don't see the relevance for passenger rail though, it's a separate issue. The question is: Does is make sense to push public transport, both locally and regionally. Given that (a) we have examples like Japan that clearly show how it can work and (b) environmental footprint of each person needs to be drastically lowered if we want to survive as a 6+ billion species, I'd put my money on 'yes'.

Edit: The USA is still the only big country with a carbon footprint way above 10 tonnes per capita and year. Americans still emit 1.8x the CO2 of Japan, even though Japanese houses have no isolation to speak of (earthquake safety / corrupt builders). It's getting better, but there's still a huge gap between the USA and and the rest of the highly industrialized world. Everyone needs to get better there, but there are a few countries that absolutely need to do a lot, or we're all fucked. So far I'd put USA, China and Russia on that list, soon probably India and Brazil as well.

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_countr...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re... (I don't have the source for car km per capita, but you can deduct it from this table)

[4] https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/280/201

[5] http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/investor/financial/2013/pdf/2013_f...

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio...