High-Speed Trains in the US? 332
demondawn asks: "Countries around the world are researching and adopting high-speed rail systems, but the U.S. seems to be behind the bandwagon. How do Americans feel about the adoption of a high-speed rail system in the U.S.? How do people in nations that have already adopted high-speed rail feel about their services? And how about tourists who have travelled either to or from the U.S. feel about public transportation around the world?"
A Good Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Good Thing (Score:5, Interesting)
But what about railroads? Amtrak you say. Starvation funding has not done that company any good. Nor has the byzantine rules Congress forced the company to follow, such as keeping a certain tongage of coal on hand for it's locomotives.
Even if cross country train travel is no longer relevant, the local trains, particularly high speed trains, can and should compete with airlines. Chicago to St. Louis or Milwaukee or Duluth. Cincinnati to Lexington. Kansas City to Oklahoma City. Houston - Dallas. LA - SanFran. New York - pretty much everywhere in New England.
It's time to bring the true interurban railroads back. We can make them fast and reliable. They are cheaper to operate in terms of fuel than airplanes. And they are much more comfortable.
Re:A Good Thing (Score:3, Informative)
In the history of the Shinkansen, there has been a single derailment (last year, due to an earthquake), but not a single death.
The previous year, there have been a total of about 1000 train accidents and about 400 deaths nationwide.
Care to compare it to deaths in car accidents?
Flying (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is it really all that cheap? (Score:2, Informative)
Sure its a pain in the ass to have to search 20 discount airlines for the one that flies where you want but its well worth your time. I wish we had one way flights for $20 with the taxs here. Sure there are so
Re:Is it really all that cheap? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now try expanding that to LA-NY - it would be a 18+ hour train ride, even with no stops and a 300kph train. That's a
Re:Flying (Score:5, Interesting)
Provided your time and aggravation are free.
Granted a train takes longer, but this is offset by the fact you can work or relax effectively on a train. Seriously, I'd rather take a train than first class air travel any day.
Re:Flying (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also offset by the fact that there is a lot less waiting involved in a train trip. You don't have to deal with security like at the airports, and you don't have as big of a problem with luggage. In addition train station are generally located in the middle of cities, while airports are generally located on the outskirts of cities, so it may be esier to get where your going once you arrive if you take a train.
Re:Flying (Score:3, Interesting)
I do agree flying between random points is very expensive, but flying to major points is cheap.
ie from Syracuse, NY to Boston ma is $400 flying takes 3hours including time spent waiting.
Driving takes 5 hours, non-stop
Rail takes 12 hours, price I don't know.
Re:Flying (Score:5, Interesting)
I could fly but it was expensive and you had to add at least an hour on for the messing about at the airport. Also you had to get to the airport in the North, and then you had to get from Heathrow or Gatwick in to the centre of the London (which meant use the shuttle trains in to Paddington or Waterloo).
I could drive but you're looking at 5 hours plus (even at my driving speeds) on a good day. Basically in good weather, clear roads and no works I could average 70mph plus but otherwise it's usually more like 50mph plus. Then you have parking and the like.
Train is cheaper than air tickets (just) and is about four hours. From where I lived it was ironically still useful to get to the airport as you could catch the local metro rail system from there to the central station. From there you step on to an express to London. Which whisks you in to the centre and you can use the Tube from there.
With the modern facilities on high(ish) speed trains in the UK I'd rather use the train than the plane every time. Power sockets, WiFi, phone, tables, nice seats *with legroom* and if you take advantage of the dining car then the food isn't bad either.
Re:Flying (Score:2)
If it can't handle the competition...
beating the dead horse (Score:5, Funny)
Re:beating the dead horse (Score:2)
Re:beating the dead horse (Score:2)
Re:beating the dead horse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:beating the dead horse (Score:3)
1) Our rising gas prices are still far cheaper than European gas prices, because we don't have a huge tax on it. Automobile owners have it good in the US, relatively speaking.
2) I don't blame your insurance company for jacking your rates if you make claims on something as minor a fender dings. Besides, it's still cheaper than European insurance prices (do we see a pattern here?)
3) If you know the repair was unnecessary, then demand, and get, your
They don't care. (Score:5, Insightful)
They are very happy squandering more and more money into bigger and bigger trucks so any proposition to do otherwise is viewed as communist. Also, there is an anglo-saxon cultural trait that sees the city as something sinful, bad, evil that should be fled at all cost, hence the popularity of suburbia.
In the same vein, here is a very good explanation of the whole idea of having livable cities [emagazine.com].
Re:They don't care. (Score:5, Insightful)
I call bull.
The United States has an average population density of 31 people per square km.
Japan averages 337.
England 243.
Italy 193.
Switzerland 181.
Ireland has 57, Brazil has 22. Their experiences with mass transit (including rail) would provide a much more reasonable basis for discussion than the way this thread is heading.
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
It would certainly help Seattle (where I live), if there were a real city-wide mass transit system. Unfortunately, it looks like there won't be one until the end of the next decade at best.
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
"Average" population density is meaningless.
If they vote for it, they will build it. (Score:5, Insightful)
USA population 293 027 571 [cia.gov]/land area 9 161 923 sq km [cia.gov]=31.98.
Sweden 8 986 400 [cia.gov]/410 934 [cia.gov]=21.87.
Finland 5 214 512 [cia.gov]/304 473 [cia.gov]=17.13.
Russia 143 782 338 [cia.gov]/16 995 800 [cia.gov]=8.46.
Even more important of course is how concentrated parts are, not the country averages.
Re:They don't care. (Score:3, Interesting)
Your argument is excellent. Pick some complementary data and it still works, which is a good cross-check:
Low density doesn't work for trains: The train used to be the primary transit link in Australia (2.6 people/km^2). Now air is. On the other hand other high-density countries (India: 318 people/km^2) still depend on rail links, although high-speed ones will be very hard to build.
Your distance metric is quite important too: go to any european rail site (ba
Re:They don't care. (Score:3, Interesting)
Err, what's so bad about cars? I'm not trolling, but I feel that cars are a very good mode of transportation. With a car, you are able to go anywhere that you want, when you want, and at reasonable speeds. With a well-built freeway system, I could go up to about 65-70 miles per hour. Many
Re:They don't care. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why you need a real mass transit system in cities where the bus/train line is separate from car traffic and so doesn't have to stop at lights, intersections, or get hung up in traffic jams, etc
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
It is hard to make an accurate statement about "anyone". How hard is it really to go from opposing the electrical grid to opposing cities? Or for a fundamentalist thinktank to observe that when third-world rural women move to the city, the women because less conservative religiously.
I think last month's Atlantic had a Frenchman reprise DeToncville. One of his observations, on seeing the desolation that is Detroit,
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
On the contrary, Europeans simply have no other choices. There's just not enough open land in Europe for the large suburban communities that have sprouted in the US. The population of France is 60 Million, while the US is around 290 Million, consider that France isn't even as big as Texas though and you
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
The suburbs are much nicer than the cities. They're GREEN, for one thing -- my neighborhood is beautifully forested. I'd rather live in the woods than be surrounded by concrete any day.
As for culture, we have coffee shops and bars too, only ours are nicer, our bookstores are bigger, and parking is easier.
Add to that the fact that in my nice, quiet, working-class suburb, I've never heard of anyone being robbed, murdered, raped
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
Suburbs are also polluted, thanks to all those car exhaust fumes, crowded (look at how crowded the roads and the strip malls are), noisy (those lawnmovers should have better mufflers), smelly (that pig farm next to the subdivision is a ki
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
Any proposition to force them to do otherwise. See the difference?
And don't you think that the very fact that you need to explain the "idea of having livable cities" suggests why people might be fleeing them?
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
Brainwashed? Do you have any frickin idea how big this country is? Have you ever lived out in the boonies? What you call brainwashed I call common sense. Yeesh, this from the site that always talks about the USA's difficulty in getting broadband to rural areas.
Re:They don't care. (Score:4, Insightful)
We chose to build vast tracts of suburbia, whose only purpose was to store people far away from the cities which provided their livelihoods. That choice necessitated that we build roads to make sure these people could use their cars in the cities. That forced sprawl on the cities themselves, since so much room has to be taken up with roads, parking lots and parking garages, gas stations, etc. It also made the lives of pedestrians and cyclists harder. Things are further apart, and much of a pedestrian's commute is spent waiting for their turn to cross the streets.
Every time we make a decision that increases the usefulness of cars at the expense of alternatives, we make it that much harder to give them up down the road.
Re:They don't care. (Score:3, Interesting)
Lot of catch-22 situations in cities. If they were designed from the start with today's technology I think most of the problems would be easy to solve (and include public transport). Trying to cha
Re:They don't care. (Score:3, Interesting)
Those people are pretty stupid when it comes to manage their finances. Say in the suburbs, a house costs $200,000 as opposed to $400,000 in the city.
In the city, you can make do with only one ca
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
Buses are the only form of mass transit that can easily be retrofitted ont
Re:They don't care. (Score:2)
You have no idea about what a big country is, pal. I live in a country [cia.gov] that's1¼ times bigger than yours, with only 10% of the population. So, don't say I don't know about "big".
People have lived in the boonies since the Mayflower, and they managed to live without cars for centuries.
Trains are best for medium distances (Score:5, Insightful)
Its the old population density issue.
Trains work great for medium distances, which describes all of Japan, and any single country in Europe. They do poorly for long distances because a standard airplane goes twice as fast (at worst case), and has no problem with terrin that is hard to get a train through.
When you go between two cities in a single country trains are nice. (often trivially slower than a plane after you factor in all the hastles of flying) This describes Europe, cities are close enough that flying isn't enough faster.
In the US cities are more spread out, except on the coasts. There is a high speed train between NY and Boston. Law prevents it from reaching high speed, but it is high speed otherwise. Well if the law wasn't in the way anyway, IIRC they need a few more upgrades to reach high speeds, but who would pay for that if you won't be able to reach those speed anyway.
I don't know what California doesn't have a high speed train. It would make sense, they have the population to support it. (though perhaps not enough people are going in one direction? I don't know)
For me there is no point in a high speed train. I live in Minneapolis, there is no place for it to go. In the metro area stops would be too frequent, and any other city is far enough away that you fly. Though that may not be true, there is a special case that might make sense. The airport is considering a train to some tiny airport outstate that can handle more planes than they can.
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2, Insightful)
Because it requires long-term thinking? California has many natural resources, but in the years I've lived here, it doesn't seem like attention span is one of them.
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
The flight is 1.5 hours, you need to show up over an hour earlier, and wait a half hour for your baggage; plus all that walking between terminals. The 3 hour train would be faster.
The problem is that you still have to go to the train station, arrive and leave on their schedule, rent a car when you arrive, etc. The plane ends up being faster.
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Don't worry. Amtrak is moronic enough to hire people from the airline industry, and those jerks will make sure that taking a train is just as inconvenient as taking a plane; they'll gladly institute all sorts of byzantine fares, reservations and make sure your ticket is checked 5 times before you even see the goddammed trai
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Also, population density is as much an effect as cause. A century ago, the U.S. was spread out because it was a mostly agricultural country, populated by individualist farmers that didn't like to be dependent on central transporation systems. Now we're an industrial country, but we still think like those 19th century farmers. So we invest in hi
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, the point I was making (I'll repeat it one more time, then accept that you're just going to ignore it) was that cars helped spread the population out.
Simply not true, at least if you define "industrial nation" as one where most people are connected to the industrial economy. A century ago, there was plenty of industry, but a good majority of Americans lived either on farms or in small towns that were the centers of the agricultural economy. That remained true up until World War II. Look it up. Jeez, I was explaining how the TGV contributes to denser population nodes, that's all. But if you want you want to talk about getting gouged, let me remind you that the government ain't the only power capable of doing that. Look at how much you spend on your car, in the form of buying the damn thing, insuring it, gassing it up, and paying all the taxes for the gigantic infrastructure that supports it. Not to mention fighting lots of nasty wars to protect those oil sources we need so badly. Even if the French taxpayer is getting ripped off, he not that much worse off than you are. The only difference his his taxes are mostly being spent in France. A good chunk of your car costs are going into the pockets of the Saudi elite.Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you're almost right but not quite. The automobile wasn't the train killer, General Motors was the train killer. Most people don't know that in the 1950s General Motors corporation actually asked and received the right from the US government to buy and destroy rail corridors, which they paid the US government for the right to do. They intentionally destroyed millions of miles of railroad track in this country.
Ever wonder why it is that in the 1900s railroad barons controlled the US and yet today there isn't any infrastructure for trains? It's because General Motors tore it up to make sure that trains wouldn't be practical and that they would have no competition. This was combined with a massive advertisement campaign to convince Americans that automobiles were the wave of the future, and that to be modern and advanced, one needed a car. Nobody talked about the rail getting ripped up by GM workers.
Now that's a reason to be outraged, and it rather undermines the argument that cars won out in the US because they were simply more adapted for the US problems. Remember that in the 1940s the US had a very extensive rail network but no freeways and very few good highways - have you seen pictures of Route 66? And that was the best highway in the country at the time. Cars were horribly impractical and slow compared to trains in the 1940s; but by the 1960s that problem was solved by General Motors' capitalistic, monopolistic decision.
Purposely and maliciously destroying national infrastructure is what conquering armies do to the vanquished as a way of making sure they never rise up again; and in war it's now considered a war crime to do such an act needlessly. And yet General Motors was rewarded with a 30-year near-monopoly of the US transportation markets...
Take your damned tinfoil hat off! (Score:4, Informative)
People always point to the Los Angeles case, where the excellent light rail system was bought by a consortium of GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil. But this was not to dismantle it. It was to make sure they were invested in whatever transportation did eventually dominate in a fast growing city. At the time no one knew. In fact they did operate the railroad for many more years, in spite of dwindling ridership. They would have continued, too. But the citizens of Los Angeles were banging down the doors of City Hall, demanding the trolley cars be removed -- because they were blocking traffic.
Read your history. Talk to some long time Los Angeles residents. This is the truth.
Re:Take your damned tinfoil hat off! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:3, Informative)
The TGV was built without a single cent coming from the government. It was paid for with money borrowed from financial institutions and bonds. And aft
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Guess what? 80% of the population is there.
The problem with trains is the US is that the oil, trucking, automobile and related industries are too important. Something like 1 in 7 jobs are related to the support of automobiles. Lots of money + jobs = political power.
There used to be a booming intercity trolley system in the US, which was eventually ripped up by a wide number of front companies controlled by GM during the 1950's.
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
But there are several
#1 is the afforementioned
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Still, he has a point. As mass transit becomes more mainstream, harassme
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
I would assume it has to do with traffic, or lack of it. I don't know what driving from Boston to NYC is like, but I know that driving from Santa Barbara to LA isn't bad. Granted, when you get to LA you end up parking on the highway for a while, but it more or less works out. I suppose it'd be nice to have
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
And it also describes all of the area between New-York and Washington too, where there is already rail service...
And you don't care about density; you don't care if the land between city A and city B is filled to the brim with people (like New-York_Boston) or empty like a desert (like Los-Angeles_Las-Vegas), because, be it in Japan, Europe or in the US, high-sp
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
and if XX=5%? (Score:2)
if normal # of trains is 10, then you have enough spares for less than one train, which may have DOZENS of brake pads.....
design defects (like automobile recalls) can affect an ENTIRE FLEET AT ONCE, when stores of non-defective parts are few.
Latly, if it turns out that the DESIGN was bad, hav
Re:Trains are best for medium distances (Score:2)
There was a news report on PBS about the Acela trains. Something about how every one of them is basically an untested prototype that had late engineering changes that increased their weight. The weight stressed the brakes too much causing the problems.
It seems like the typical government BS project to me.
Two Big Reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
The other problem is plain old ideology. Or maybe culture is a better word. I'm not sure you can separate the two concepts when it comes to American transportation. Which means cars. Cars are our symbols of individuality, our favorite hobby, our main form of self-expression. Cars are the ultimate anti-socialist hyper-libertarian thing: they allow you to go where you want, when you want. None of those commie-fascist train schedules!
So no transportation system that would take money away from cars has a chance of more than token funding. Too bad the cost of this is obscene: freeways that cost millions per mile, traffic casualties that make a world war look like a stubbed toe, and huge payments to overseas oil vendors that are destroying our currency. Not to mention that a good chunk of that oil money gets diverted to the very terrorists we spend billions fighting.
I don't expect these facts to change, or ever for a lot of people to admit that we have a problem. (Car addicts, like any other, are good at denial.) I just couldn't resist a chance to point out that we do have a problem.
Re:Two Big Reasons (Score:2)
Re:Two Big Reasons (Score:2)
Cars are the single best thing to happen to transportation, ever. They give individuals more freedom than they have ever had before, and are one of the major contributing factors to the success of American society in this century. When anyone can work or live anywhere, everyone has much more opportunity to participate. And that's a GOOD thing.
The ONLY problem with cars is that the id
Re:Two Big Reasons (Score:4, Interesting)
Oddly enough, though, in France, which is hardly a parangon of private entreprise, highways are owned by private companies (and they charge an arm an a leg to travel on them, too)...
Re:Two Big Reasons (Score:3, Informative)
Santa Cruz, CA also (Score:2)
That would be so handy for when I want pizza..
American trains VS. other trains: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:American trains VS. other trains: (Score:2)
No the main problem lies in the bureaucracy. When the goverment has to vote on how many miles of catenary you can fix this year you have a problem. When you have to fix the tracks so that local railroads can use them and do not pay you for the service, you have a problem. When slow moving freight trains have priority on the tracks, and the government needs to
The problem is privatly owned rails. (Score:2, Insightful)
Amtrak runs according to CSXs schedule, for example in the Northeast. Freight has priority, like you said, so therefore they cannot be competitive because they can't set their own schedule.
Whether there is some sort of "conspiracy", I don't know. But compound this fact with America's love of the automobile and there is no way rail transpo
Re:American trains VS. other trains: (Score:2)
Also they may not have had to pay for it, as there are plenty of mutally beneficial relations that amtrak establishes between public transit systems, especially commuter railroads.
zerg (Score:2)
In Hudson County, NJ, they're busy on a light rail system. My little sister loves it, and it does seem to be meeting its usage quotas... But it's anything but high speed. My guess is that you'll see more things like this in semi-crowd
Re:zerg (Score:2)
Not so. If you try to do this from say Philadelphia, to say New Haven, you will quickly notice that drivi g around New York takes a crapload of time, and driving through New York can take even longer.
On many stretches, Amtrak trains, even non high speed, can easily go about 110 to 130 mph, and regularl
The problem is the US gov't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Rails are more fuel efficent for moving freight than paying tons of money on an interstate highway system, and then have 16 wheelers burn all that diesel without significantly subsidizing the roadway. If the rails were more robust in operation, instead of truckers driving across the country, they could move freight from major rail stops, and cut down on the interstate driving. In NYC alone, getting a freight line into Long Island would significantly reduce the volume of trucks across the bridges & highways.
Back in the go-go '90's, there was so much air traffic, major airports like LaGuardia (LGA, NYC) basically had a hazardous airspace from all the planes (still does). High-speed rail would cut out the need for short commuter flights. Not that its such a problem now, and the airlines obvious don't like competition. But again, you burn way more fuel for flying (per pound), than you do for rail.
If you presume that petroleum based fuels will be in short supply, its in the national interest to have a more coherent transporation policy. Also, having a robust rail system give the U.S. redundant system in case one has to go down (i.e. 9/11, bomb threat on a bridge or tunnel).
The reason why this will not happen in the near future is threefold. 1) The stupidity (psychology) of the average American citizen (SUV driver). 2) Special interests such as the airlines and trucking industry, and 3) politicians.
Passenger rail could easily be cost effective. The problem is that Amtrak is a gov't agency, and Congress is loaded with parasites that insist on a rail stop in their district. So instead of stops based on customer usage and efficiency, you end up with rail lines making more stops than needed, so they can get the fiscal vote of support from the local congressman.
Ironically, the short term incompetence of this gov't makes this cluster f**k incredibly insigificant as a problem. There probably should be a slashdot poll on how many people drive SUVs.
Re:The problem is the US gov't. (Score:2)
Re:The problem is the US gov't. (Score:2)
This is only an argument against local mass transit systems. Absolutely not the case for the intercity trains. Most people hate driving from DC to Boston, and if the trains were a bit faster and did not have a reputation of being slow, all of them would start using the train.
Only idiots, and large group travellers will take an SUV, since then it becomes cheaper. But even then it is not the case, as amtrak frequently has large grou
Fast train might be a bad thing for U.S. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Japanese believe that if they board a train, they'll arrive on time. There is no flexibility in our society; people are not flexible, either. If you go abroad, you find that trains don't necessarily arrive on time," Mr. Sawada said. "This disaster was produced by Japanese civilization and Japanese people." said Yasuyuki Sawada, a 49-year-old railway worker.
The Japanese search for rail perfection is relentless, from the humble commuter train to the country's most famous tracks. In 2004, on the 40th anniversary of the bullet train, there was much hand-wringing over the fact that a year earlier the trains on that line had registered on average a delay - of six seconds...
I mentioned this on my AQFL site [aqfl.net].
Re:Fast train might be a bad thing for U.S. (Score:2)
Re:Fast train might be a bad thing for U.S. (Score:2)
The UK (Score:3, Funny)
Geography and Culture Driven (Score:3, Informative)
I'm an Aussie who has lived some years in Europe, and I've come to the conclusion that the take up or otherwise of public transport is largely culture driven.
Here in Australia the rail system is virtually non-existant - high or low speed. But I can see a lot of commonality with the situation in the US.
Population density in Aus is far lower than the US, let alone Europe or Japan. Our population is mainly centered in one large city in each state, with the closest of these being ~900km apart. This makes air travel the only option these days.
But on top of that we have ended up with a very US-style culture when it comes to many things - and car ownership as an expression of individuality is one of them. Even within the big cities, most people drive everywhere (even when that results in being stuck in a huge traffic jam). Building more tollways seems to be the government response to this. Meanwhile much of the public transport infrastructure has been privatised - and we all know private enterprise does not like to spend money without a guaranteed return.
Every so often, a dreamy eyed train lover will propose a high speed rail link along the most trafficed route in the country (Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne) but it never gets off the ground.
Highspeed trains not that useful in the US. (Score:2)
Here is an example of some of the problems with it. I live in Florida this year I had to travel to Dallas, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, AZ. Each of these would be Really long train rides even with High speed rail except for Dallas. I drove to Dallas because it was cheaper and I was going to visit family. You can not get around Dallas without a car. So I would have had to rent one for two weeks.
The dista
Re:Highspeed trains not that useful in the US. (Score:2)
St. Louis - Chicago - Milwaukee (this is a big one)
Pittsburgh - Harrisburg - Lancaster - Philadelphia
DC - Richmond - Charlotte - Atlanta
Miami - Tampa - Orlando - Jacksonville (this one is perhaps less travelled)
The Texas triangle
All of these corridors are a bit too small for efficient flight, and have enough traffic to support a train system.
There are more people going for shorter distances than there are going for long ones. The trains are sup
Foreign train systems (Score:2, Informative)
Lost Cause (Score:2)
I've spent time and travelled in Europe via train - and it is
Re:Lost Cause (Score:2)
High speed trains on the other hand become competitive with planes on medium runs of about 300-500 mi. This results in a lot of connection that can be successful.
The main problem that high speed trains are facing is the reputation of the slow speed trains. Most people think t
Re:Lost Cause (Score:2)
MAYBE you will be able to come up with a FEW such connections. But the fact is that population density is the killer. In Europe and Japan high density urban centers push 15,000 people per sq. mile, but in the US the densest centers are 6,000 people per square mile, plus the cities are not distributed radially, but along a coastline, AND most of t
Re:Lost Cause (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it mostly comes down to network effects. The car culture is what perpetuates the car culture.
When you get off the train in Paris, I'm guessing that you can step straight onto the intracity transit system. It's the only thing that makes sense, because all those people flooding in through the train system need so
We need more (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that integrating high speed rail would also be wonderful, if I could go from here to Orlando in a half hour I'd do it all the time.
Useful idea and over due (Score:3, Insightful)
Why few high speed trains in the US (Score:3, Interesting)
In Ohio, there have been proposals for YEARS about high speed trains connecting Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. It's gotten some support in the legislature, but is unlikely to ever happen. The right of way is not a major problem, as a high speed line could parallel I-71 for most of the distance. Money is an issue, as a long high speed line would be expensive, but the main problem is politics.
The legislators from the 3C cities would support it, but that would not be enough to pass funding. In order to gain support, the line would need to have stops in as many legislative districts as possible. This would assure that 1) costs would become astronomical, and 2) the high speed line would have so many stops that it would no longer be high speed.
In Texas, there was much talk of a line connecting San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas / Fort-Worth. The political problem was somewhat of an issue, but two problems proved insurmountable - opposition from two groups. The first is ranchers whose land would be bisected by the high speed line. They'd gain no benefit and the value of their property would be reduced. But the main problem was that there already is high-speed connections between San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas / Fort Worth. It's provided by a major Texas employer with considerable political clout - Southwest Airlines.
I really have enjoyed rail travel in Europe, and would love to see the US cris-crossed with high speed bullet-train or mag-lev routes. Best of all would be to integrate air and high-speed train travel, by having stops at major airports, and coordinating air and train schedules. Then high speed trains could be used for intermediate distances, and air for long distance travel. I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime, if ever.
Re:On another note (Score:2)
Re:On another note (Score:2)
Trains will only catch on if they can actually get you there in an acceptable amount of time for an acceptable price. Ev
Re:On another note (Score:2)
That's the idea of "high-speed rail", which happens to be the subject of conversation here.
There are whole industries which will fight tooth and nail the idea of high-speed rail, because they know very well that if people are given transportation choices, the car and the airline will not win all the time.
This is the f
Re:On another note (Score:3, Funny)
Or a land area that takes 4 days to get across, but at least we got our jab at SUV owners in.
Re:Amtrack should get NOTHING (Score:2)
How profitable roads are? How much money those roads are bringing in? How many privately-owned highways are there? None at all... That's because no private company will touch that. So why are you accepting that your tax dollars fund a stillborn business???
Re:There's many reasons why... (Score:2)
My two city pairs have practically no airports (2 flights a day), are overpriced, and require two layovers, or 1 6 hour layover. In either case, the train is about a quarter of cost, and about 2 hours faster than the fastest you could ever take on the plane.
When both of your cities are not hubs, you begin to realize how crappy and expensive flying can be.
Re:Buses and Taxis (Score:2)
All of these are quite successful, but they do not serve the same purpose as a high speed train does.
Re:History (Score:3, Informative)
When do you think the first motorway in Europe was built? More importantly by whom? (1930s Germany)
When you do think the railways were built? 50 or 60 years ago our railways were already 150 years old. Both my grandparents had cars in the fifties.
Goddess knows where you got your ideas of Europe from but they're a bit wrong.