So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing.
The US is the world's largest economy and should be the shining example of amazing infrastructure, high-tech, green cities, and forward thinking policies. California is an especially egregious example in terms of infrastructure investment:
If California was a country it would be the world's fifth largest economy. It has a number of large and successful cities and areas connected along the coastline. San Diego, Orange County, LA, San Francisco. Why on earth isn't there a high speed rail between these cities? Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins? LA to San Fran in an hour and a half?
I took the train once from Irvine to Los Angeles and felt I had gone back in time to 1980. This in one of the richest counties in the world (OC). It's unthinkable in the year 2019, that we are all stuck on roads like I5 and 405, stuck in traffic for hours trying to make it to LA and the alternative is an ancient train trundling along at 50mph.
I hate the fact that an autocratic and repulsive Government is showing up the US in terms of green tech investment and high tech public transport systems, while the US govt is dropping taxes for the biggest companies and lowering spending on infrastructure and public works. This is guaranteed to have a terrible knock on effect over the next 20 years while the US is stuck with an old fashioned and clogged up transit system, polluted cities, and a dependence on fossil fuels.
I agree with your sentiments overall, so don't take my "it's not all gloom and doom" comment as a disagreement... But there are people out there trying! The project from Texas Central Railways is looking like a sooner bet than California's line, for a number of reasons. An example of a reason is lower price, stemming from geography. The route doesn't require building tunnels through mountains and the like.
Although even then there are some disappointing Catch-22 processes at work. A State Senator is using the existence of a particular court case to try and delay/prevent funding, and the plaintiffs of a court case using the Senator's opposition (which cites their case) as an argument in favor of their case.
Nonetheless, I'm optimistic on the Dallas to Houston high speed rail. In my dreams, I see that project's completion as giving California a dose of motivation, so as not to be second fiddle to Texas.
You weren't paying attention then ;) because you could have been hearing about it as far back as the 80's, when Southwest first lobbied it to death (the twice-an-hour-takeoff Houston-Dallas route was their most profitable). I would love to be corrected on this by someone who was in State gov't at that time, but this is my understanding.
>The high speed rail was originally supposed to run from Dallas to San Antonio, and Austin to Houston.
When it was proposed to be federally-funded, yes. From what I recall it was a US-French collaboration that was going to fulfill that one? Unfortunately the politics at the time led to the state gov't to not seek any of the $8BB (iirc) the Obama administration was trying to give out to kick-start nationwide HSR. You can thank Rick Perry & Co. for that.
Now it is a (somewhat) different private group, and if you are posting on Hacker News, I expect you can appreciate how much harder it is to start out with a network connecting 4 cities, than a network connecting 2 cities, when you've not got federal backing. I too would love the "Texas T" network of routes as well, but that didn't happen. Again, you can thank the State administration of a decade ago for turning down the opportunity of federal assistance to build a transit network worthy of Texas.
You say it is "a joke", but it is going to take real work to build, provide real jobs, and deliver real value to people who ride it. Are you so cynical that you would you rather not have it at all, and have nothing to look to, to improve on later? If the route is successful, surely it would come to Austin and San Antonio next? What is the advantage, in your mind, of adopting an all-or-nothing framing?
From last few years, we are trying. Now look, I appreciate efforts to build such thing in democratic country. but honestly this can't be an excuse as someone is doing better job than us.
I travel from Dallas to Houston every week for work and have been following this closely. Often after a run of crummy trips by air due to delays and other common air travel issues I take an executive charter bus just to take a break. All the while dreaming of what it would be like transiting via maglev at 1kmph
Did you mean a thousand miles per hour? Dallas to Houston is under 300 miles so a thousand miles per hour would make the commute about eighteen minutes? But then, 1k miles per hour is 447.04 meters per second while speed of sound is about 343 meters per second so I don't know if that technology yet exists...
At a thousand kilometers per hour, even including about fifteen minutes of speeding up and slowing down time, a train from Dallas to Houston shouldn't take more than an hour. It would be awesome.
Speaking of dreaming, Google says Miami to Seattle is about 48 h (3,303.3 mi) driving via I-90 W. Lets round it up to 6000 kilometers to avoid sharp turns. A non-stop train at 1000 kmph would be a six hour train ride, down from a forty eight hour drive.
Imagine a train on this route, full of quiet cars on this route.
Vonlane by chance? If so, that company is great. I cannot recommend them enough to people. There was a rocky bit in 2016 for them and I am so glad they survived and are growing their routes and times.
> I hate the fact that an autocratic and repulsive Government
The Chinese government is much more autocratic yet it obviously does a much better job in building infrastructure
The problem with the US government is lobbyism. It does not work for itself, it does not work for the people, it works for big corporations and lawyers.
I also think that the people with influence, money and power have created a parallel world that almost has no overlap with the world most other people live in. They live in different areas, go to different schools, have different doctors or can afford the billing insanity in health care, have different career opportunities, don’t use the same air travel, have their incomes rise all the time. They probably really think that things are going great so why invest in or improve infrastructure and pay taxes?
Interestingly enough, the collective net worth of the Chinese leadership is higher than the US leadership by at least an order of magnitude.
> The richest 70 members of China’s legislature added more to their wealth last year than the combined net worth of all 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the president and his Cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court justices.
> The net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’s Congress, which opens its annual session on March 5, rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of $11.5 billion from 2010, according to figures from the Hurun Report, which tracks the country’s wealthy. That compares to the $7.5 billion net worth of all 660 top officials in the three branches of the U.S. government.
Yeah, and to think the power a delegate in China's legislature have, you're asked to be a delegate and you show up to a meeting ONCE every 5 year, and rubber stamp 90% of proposals while rejecting 10% of absolutely batshit crazy stuff that some other delegate happened to suggest. Incidentally, everything submitted by the CCP magically falls under that 90% camp, with 2 known exception in the 70 years history of China. Yeah, that's a whole lot of power right there, you got me mate.
The problem is that during the last major American infrastructure buildout, the Interstates, experts basically rammed through projects without considering local impacts or local objections, and highways ended up gutting a lot of the neighborhoods (often poor or minority ones) that they went through.
Eventually the pendulum swung in the other direction and people gained the ability to stop urban freeways, but now the pendulum has swung too far and people will sue projects out of existence.
China's land rights (or lack thereof) are not uncontroversial, and I would be surprised if they don't become a flashpoint in the future.
The interstate highway system was originally envisioned as going around the cities, not through them. Unfortunately, local politicians and construction unions pushed for the opposite, resulting in the displacement of thousands of homes. St. Louis (where I went to college) is a sad example of this; I-55 was a dagger through the heart of the city and to this day there is bitterness over how many homes were razed in the name of progress. The city never really recovered from it, actually.
This is not true. The interstate highway system was a massive improvement to our country and enabled us to leap ahead. There are always sour grapes from people who had to move, but moving should not be a big deal.
The interstate highway system between cities, and around cities, was a great improvement.
The interstate highway system through cities was a disaster that mostly served to turn economically productive land into craters of parking lots generating very little tax revenue. Those with the means fled severed neighborhoods with spiking pollution levels, leaving the poor with asthma in their wake. While some cities managed to recover in the following decades, not all of them have.
And suburbs that people fled to are not necessarily faring any better; suburbs are cheap to live in initially but become extremely expensive when you start having to replace infrastructure at the end of its life. Nassau County, NY, home of the first generation of suburbs, has been under state fiscal control since 2000 despite being one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, because the fiscal math does not add up.
A lot of the suburban growth that happened was also just shuffling it around a region rather than true growth. For example, Buffalo's metro area has tripled in land area despite the same population, so the same tax base is now expected to support triple the infrastructure.
Chinese government is much more autocratic yet... building infrastructure
Here’s my hypothesis: when it comes to infrastructure, the operative word is not yet, it’s therefore. Autocrats have a much easier time cutting through any red tape put up by those lower on the food chain than them.
In a democratic society, such as the US, there are countless stakeholders who need to be included in the process for huge infrastructure projects like this. Unfortunately, too many chefs spoil the broth as they say.
I've heard that whereas American politicians are mostly lawyers, Chinese politicians are mostly engineers. If true, that would partly explain why they get a lot more done.
Another factor may be that the US has elections every 4 year. There is no long-term planning happening, because who knows what's happening in 4 years. Too much energy is spent on political campaigns, destroying your opponent and getting re-elected.
With you on the lawyers. Not sure about the cycles.
If you go back 50 years there were still the same election cycles but countries, not just US, were getting volumes of serious projects done.
I think its more abut the mindset change in both politicions and votes. Back then we were nation building. People expected some sacrifice to create a better future and they were witnessing this progress.
Today many people are seeing their quality of life reduce and this creates a focus on grabbing yours and looking for quick wins.
We have a great example in Australia where the govt tried to roll out nation fibre broadband. The oposition critisied what was largely a good plan as far as I can tell simply because they were the opposition. The opposition won the next election, implemented their 'this saves money' plan and fucked it leaving our country with a $50bn project that has done bugger all to improve internet.
Also now its buggered I regularily see people posting things like "why should my tax dollars pay to fix it, if you want fast interent you should pay yourself" type thing. This rather than, this is the modern circulation system of the economy and if we dont fix it our country will lose significant future oppurtunity.
But yeah we have a huge proportion of lawyer politicions in Aus and I think this is an issue. We should be looking for genuine 'doer' skill sets. I almost wonder if we should ban running as political parties and people have to run as themself so we fcus on theier histor and achivements more rather than are they my tribe.
One of the problems may actually be rights. The US government generally has more respect for individual rights and property rights. This leads to increased safety regulations, work restrictions, and the property rights make it difficult to purchase the land and negotiate the permits necessary for large infrastructure projects.
China is much more willing to force people out of their homes for the greater good. It will be interesting to see which prevails.
Reading the Wikipedia page on HSR in China, maybe they don't respect individual land rights, but it does seem like the government does respond to some extent to citizens concerns.
"Residents living along the proposed maglev route have raised health concerns about noise and electromagnetic radiation emitted by the trains, despite an environmental assessment by the Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences saying the line was safe.[26] These concerns have prevented the construction of the proposed extension of the maglev to Hangzhou."
"In 2003, the MOR was believed to favor Japan's Shinkansen technology, especially the 700 series.[29] However, Chinese citizens angry with Japan's denial of World War II atrocities organized a web campaign to oppose the awarding of HSR contracts to Japanese companies. The protests gathered over a million signatures and politicized the issue.[31] The MOR delayed the decision, broadened the bidding and adopted a diversified approach to adopting foreign high-speed train technology."
>The Chinese government is much more autocratic yet it obviously does a much better job in building infrastructure
I think that a big reason for this is that the US already has a half-working solution in place. Some infrastructure already exists that fulfills this role. China, on the other hand, didn't have much of an alternative in place, thus it was easier to find the will to build it.
We saw the same thing with internet connectivity and government services in Eastern Europe. Governments built much more modern infrastructures and offered more modern services because they weren't burdened by the past.
This is my hunch as well. Innovation comes with built-in technical debt and it is often invisible at the time. Years later, when the inefficiencies are more apparent, those with the opportunity to start with a blank slate, can avoid many of those mistakes, and make something better.
China is a communist country, one impact being that the government owns all property. For example, individuals lease/rent their homes but the terra firma is the peoples'.
If the Chinese government wants to put a train line where houses, farms, or offices used to be, they do it. One, because they already own the land. And two, the faster goods and services can move, the faster the economy can grow.
Not an advocate for socialist/communist capitalism, but this is one area where central planning can move a little faster than the west. One are the west can vastly improve is permit streamlining.
There's a reason the autocratic government in Civilization has classically been the most efficient one in the ruleset for military and infrastructure buildout. Having to get consensus is slow and error-prone. Decentralized decision-making is effective at preserving a status quo while making minor tweaks, but not so great for changing a status quo radically.
I think the US has major infrastructure changes pinned largely to wartime, 20s Depression, and other extraordinary events that gave the government unusual flexibility.
In democratic countries we need some way of overriding individual rights for the collective good once in a while, but then the problem is that governments inevitably seem to get drunk on the power and start abusing it.
The alternative to being stuck in traffic for hours is flying.
A major problem with train systems in the United States (and this is both short and long haul) is that almost the entire country is sprawl - built around the automobile.
In dense environments (China and the north-east coast of the US (which has Acela), it's great to take a train into the core -- you beat traffic and are near your destination.
In sprawling environments (like most of CA), the benefit of ending up in the core is so much less (possibly even negative). Lower probability you are near your destination. And if you need to drive, now you are in a much worse situation (higher car rental prices due to high land values, you are stuck in traffic trying to leave the urban core, etc.).
In other words, even if you had a train, most individuals still will prefer driving (you have a car with you) or flying (faster than trains) -- killing the ROI on building the train in the first place.
> A major problem with train systems in the United States (and this is both short and long haul) is that almost the entire country is sprawl - built around the automobile.
this is an excuse i have repeated myself, but it is just that, an excuse. have you actually been to china? i have never seen such sprawl. shanghai is massive and sprawling. but yet, they (china) have extremely efficient and unbelievably cheap trains and subways. also, i have never seen a cleaner subway than what i saw in shanghai.
and this excuse doesn't even account for regions like the northeast. the amtrak from boston to new york takes four hours at its absolute fastest and costs couple hundred dollars. this is unbelievably sad. in china, the same ride would take about 1.5 hours and cost around $20 for business class (in u.s. terms, as in china, it's called first class).
If you want to see what prices would be in the U.S, look at Japan.
Tokyo to Kyoto one way is 13,080 yen ($120) for the cheapest ticket, for a distance of 226 miles. About the same distance as DC to New York.
A lot of people think high speed rail would be cheaper to flying, in reality it's often the same or more than flying today. And it then costs billions of dollars to build the rail.
As for subways, that unfortunately seems more like a corruption/mismanagement problem in the U.S unfortunately. Our subway systems aren't exactly cheap to build, but are often dirty and late like you say. I would much rather put effort into fixing problems with how we spend the money today, then throwing money at high speed rail.
At $240 round trip, though it's great you could take the train in only 2 hours, it's not as if your average citizen in Kyoto is going to head down to Tokyo on a whim.
That obviously varies drastically by city. In this case, DC and Tokyo have airports close to downtown and connected by subway. And these airports could connect you to the entire world of course, rather than within ~500 miles (reasonably).
And the only reason train stations are downtown is due to historical reasons. If you had to make a 35 track train station today in your average American city, it would very likely not be downtown. Even in China these train stations are often on the outside loop of the city.
> If you had to make a 35 track train station today in your average American city, it would very likely not be downtown.
In Seattle, the trains used to run through the city. The corridors are still there, but the new light rail system avoids using them, making it far, far more expensive.
They recently dug a new transit tunnel under the city. The best use for the old tunnel they could think of was to fill it with the rubble dug out of the new one.
The expensive tunnel boring machine was sold for scrap.
I don't understand the thought processes involved in these decisions.
Japan also makes driving less attractive since they privatized their highway network and put tolls on nearly the whole thing, so driving Tokyo to Kyoto will cost you half as much just in tolls (it starts making sense economically when you're a family and driving one car vs buying 4 tickets)
Shanghai is massive but that's just the sheer size of its population. It's the most populous city in the world on some measures; they've planning for 30 billion by 2030. It's built much denser than most US cities, which means it's much more walkable, and the subway network also makes it much more practical to travel by train because it means you don't need a car at the other end.
You have to start with getting rid of parking minimums and "green space" and building dense, walkable cities. Once you have those it makes a lot more sense to connect them with trains or similar.
Been to China many times actually. I wouldn't call Shanghai sprawl in the American sense. Yes it is huge, but what matters is that driving isn't a quick way to get around the city (there are no quick ways to get around the city, just like NYC) so you don't end up needing a car to live or travel.
Agreed though that the Acela cooridor is the most reasonable place for the US to invest in high speed rail
I commute by train to New Haven on the same tracks that Acela uses.
The existing track corridor in New England is not appropriate for true high-speed train service. That really requires new right-of-ways, which would be extremely expensive in the Northeast.
There are currently plans for the next version of Acela but it is more about replacing aging equipment than any true speed upgrade. The Acela trains are almost 20 years old but I've never been on one as the price difference from the regular service isn't worth the small increase in time. Here are some numbers. I'm showing the cheapest "Saver" fares which are limited, must be purchased in advance, and have strict refund rules. I just picked November 4 as the date for advanced purchase (about +30 days):
NYC to Washington DC.
Acela Non-Stop: $137, 2h37m
Acela Regular: $137, 2h57m (+20m from non-stop)
NorthEast Reg: $54, 3h25m (+48m from non-stop)
Here are Boston to D.C:
Acela Non-Stop: $144, 6h39m
Acela Regular: $144, 7h5m (+21m from non-stop)
NorthEast Reg: $81, 7h59m (+1h20m from non-stop)
Everyone swooning over the train infrastructure in China seems to overlook the raw power that the Chinese government wields to claim right-of-ways, fix labor rates, and so on. It is also almost impossible get a good sense of the financial structure of those projects. How much money was put into them? Could that money have been better spent elsewhere? What is the debt structure? The ROE? The environmental impact?
People in China that lose their homes to infrastructure projects do get compensated for it.
I think the bigger advantage for China is that the decision to run the track on some alignment doesn’t get litigated and re-litigated for years before construction is allowed to begin.
I would note that not only do you need to acquire a lot of property on straight lines, you need to do so while resolving to not benefit anywhere between your start and end points.
Non-stop is an important element of a truly fast train. Firstly because you don't want to be constantly stopping and starting, but also because you don't want to detour your route through a dozen cities which aren't conveniently on a straight-line route to your destination.
So if you want to make a train run as fast as possible between Boston, NYC and DC, you're telling Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and maybe Delaware, "Hey, we want to take a big chunk of your land for our project, and no, we don't want our super-fast trains to stop at any of your cities, and we can't even run a slower train because making the tracks actually go through the right parts of your cities would slow down our fast trains too much."
That isn't true. You have multiple tracks for a reason. Generally, you have three separate trains on the same tracks and a sidetrack that goes into the cities or two tracks that split before the city and merge after the city.
1. Direct - They have the least stops and are the fastest. They don't go into towns. They go around them.
2. Express - They only stop at the largest towns.
3. Regular - They are the slowest and stop at every town.
You then use timing to make sure that they don't crash. The slow train will generally stop on the track and wait while the direct overtakes it (you don't want them both moving at the same time).
If you have three cities on a perfectly straight line, you can run your high-speed trains as above.
If the city in the middle is not on a straight line path between the two end cities, now your train tracks need to curve to connect the three. If you make the curve a large enough, smooth enough curve, it won't hurt your maximum speed much, but when you're talking "1000 km/hr" ... and in any case, you're also adding miles to your route, and if you make your route 20% longer to weave from city to city along the way, you are also make it 20% slower.
Great comment. I would add that back in the 30's everyone was swooning over Hitlers autobahns. It's incredible what can be accomplished when you don't have a pesky democracy getting in your way.
> this is an excuse i have repeated myself, but it is just that, an excuse. have you actually been to china? i have never seen such sprawl. shanghai is massive and sprawling. but yet, they (china) have extremely efficient and unbelievably cheap trains and subways. also, i have never seen a cleaner subway than what i saw in shanghai.
Shanghai’s massive but I don’t think sprawling is really the right word. Where people live is very dense compared to almost anywhere in the US. Even if you go an hour on the metro from the centre most places will be four or more stories high. If you go two hours out there are suburbs resembling what you’d see in Europe but those are for the rich or upper middle class willing to go into a lot of debt.
US style sprawling suburbs do not exist. And it’s density that makes mass transport viable. Central Paris doesn’t really go above eight stories tall and they have their metro. Dublin barely has anything above five stories tall and precious little that high and their tram network is successful.
Flying easily adds 1-3 hours to the trip just for bullshit and boarding and stuff so there is a certain distance where the high speed trains are faster.
It's also way more comfortable and relaxed. I prefer train over driving when I'm going somewhere too.. well until I discovered lane assist functions in modern cars that is :)
But I can't yet work while driving so I guess the train wins in overall productivity.
Flying is also a massive hit to the environment so I try to minimise it. So far I've avoided three roundtrips with planes and driven my car instead, but I've had to fly twice when going Oslo->Helsinki->Oslo.. I should probably have driven there too but for this instance time was of the essence.
Exactly. We would be better off disrupting the BS of air travel then building out train networks. I've often dreamed of a world that comes to its senses and realizes that adding all the extra bull to flying hasn't done any good and there was a consistent effort to eliminate it all.
Imagine if flying was as easy as getting on a train or bus. Buy a pass. Sign up for a slot on a flight online. Show up DIRECTLY to the gate (your are pre-cleared by TSA and AI verified your face on exit of the vehicle). Someone else or some automated car mover parks your car, drop your bag off IMMEDIATELY on a conveyor belt and forget about it (let some AI system handle its tracking and tagging), then just board with a valid pass. No lines, no checkin process, no bag tagging, per-screened, no fuss. In your seat within 5 minutes of exiting your car. Similar experience on the backend. You exit, grab your bag quickly (not sure how this would work, mass bag pile or some tech to quickly exfiltrate your bag from the plane), then get on a shuttle to a rental car center or bus/taxi/uber center to wherever you are going. Or some automated car mover retrieves your car from a parking garage and has it ready for you outside. Maybe even has your bags carried by drone to it quickly.
That does nothing about the fact that flying is destroying our environment and emits greenhouse gas emissions 2 orders of magnitude over the same trip by train.
If you ammortize the environmental impact of building the rail network over all the rail trips, it might swing the other way. Especially if someone figures out carbon neutral air travel in the next decade.
It's not sprawl, it's that the United States, and by extension Canada, have extensive freight rail systems but almost zero exclusively passenger rail networks.
In Europe and Asia these networks are generally separated.
The American model means that passenger trains need to be built to freight-train safety standards, that a passenger car must be engineered to "survive" a potential collision with a freight train, since that is a possibility.
American passenger trains don't own their right-of-way, and freight companies really don't care about high-speed anything since their business model doesn't require it.
Interesting enough the new version of the Acela trains in the Northeast will not have to be built to those freight train standards. On of the reasons is that the tracks are not generally shared with freight trains in the Northeast corridor.
I recently took VIA rail, from Vancouver to Edmonton. Partway through the trip the attendant announces we'll be 6-10 hours late, which is normal. It hasn't been on time since April. Some daft Europeans with a connecting flight were relieved that we pulled in to Edmonton only 2 hours late! The best in weeks!
> killing the ROI on building the train in the first place
In Seattle the light rail was pressured to serve the poor communities. Once built, they belatedly discovered that a transit station causes gentrification around it, pushing out the longtime residents. So they've tried zoning to prevent development around the transit station, which then reduces the ROI on the system.
Interesting, from https://www.amtrak.com/acela-train:
"Superior comfort, upscale amenities and polished professional service at speeds up to 150 mph, Acela offers hourly service downtown to downtown during peak morning and afternoon rush hours between New York, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other intermediate cities, as well as many convenient round-trips between New York and Boston."
“And at only five times the cost of a Jetblue shuttle from JFK to Logan!”
Having lived between NY and Boston for most of my life, and being a massive fan of trains, I am always so disappointed this isn’t a more realistic option.
If I wanted to take a trip to LA there is no way I would spend a day driving each way on the I5. So for me it’s either fly or take a train. Regardless of the sprawl within metro areas, there is absolutely a need for connections between big cities - the last mile transit for airports is still bad anyway
I think you are misunderstanding my point. The issue in America is that you tend to need a car to navigate within a city (metro area). Far less true in China.
> Jerry Brown tried to build the CA bullet train 4 decades ago.
Amusing to me he did the Rip Van Winkle and popped up as Governor again after 30 years. In office he pushed hard to get CHSR built. Every time California's high speed rails come up on HN it's obvious that everyone here hates the idea. So the US is getting what it's collectively asking for and deserves here.
> Every time California's high speed rails come up on HN it's obvious that everyone here hates the idea
California's major cities are almost in a line along the coast. That's the route that makes sense.
California's HSR instead took a tour through the Central Valley's farming communities, taking a slam dunk pitch for linking San Francisco and San Diego via L.A. and turning it into a carcass.
Unless you wanted to build an HSR line through a long coastal mountain range most of way from SF to LA further driving up the cost, having it go the majority of the distance through a relatively flat valley definitely has its benefits. I do think that the line should have paralleled i-5 instead of going through Bakersfield and Fresno, but that's not the choice that was made.
That's because they mostly avoided mountains on their high speed routes. The Tokaido and Sanyo Shinkansen mostly follow the coastline and the Tohoku Shinkansen mostly goes through a valley. There are lines that do bore through mountain ranges, but nothing to the extent of several hundred miles as would be required for a line through the California coastal range.
I feel like this sort of thing just proves that the problem with building high speed rail in the US is cultural[1] and political[2] not technical or economic.
[1] Americans have been carefully propagandized to believe that governments can't do anything right. And cars represent manhood and freedom.
[2] For instance Ubber and Lift are funding the same anti public transportation organizations the Koch brother(s) were.
Americans have been carefully propagandized to believe that governments can't do anything right
Then the people decide to give the government a chance, pass a proposition asking for rail, and then the government completely screws it up. Terrible route, corrupt, massively over budget, graft, and effectively cancelled after a decade of waste and work. So now even progressive people in progressive California are thinking the government can't so anything right, not because of propaganda, but because they see the failure.
And the current estimated cost of that hsr system exceeds the estimated cost of the entire 520 mi (840 km) phase 1 system in California. Imagine scaling the cost of a similar design to travel the distance from SF to LA, ignoring the fact that the Japanese tend to build these grand infrastructure projects far more cost effectively than we do.
Well, then definitely try the Kurobe Gorge mountain railway! It's a originally industrial railway in a deep valley that was used for dam construction. On the hour long journey it goes through none less than 42 tunnels & the view (when not underground :) ) is breathtaking. :)
Huh? They absolutely were. Cities that look close on a map can easily take 3x long as you would think to get to by train because the high speed line goes a long way around (or, in the case of e.g. Nagasaki, because there's no high speed line there at all).
Bakersfield and Fresno metro's are about half a million people each. And also the current planned route is close to Santa Cruz and Monterrey Counties which adds another 3/4 of a million people.
No matter how you slice it the original route is going to leave some people out.
If you count Gilroy as close to Santa Cruz and Monterrey, then sure. But the planned line does take a hard east turn through the Pacheco pass into the central valley south of Gilroy.
Six and a half million people live in the Central Valley. So it's about 15% of the state population. And running high speed rail through the central valley is fairly cheep. The planned high speed rail line tends to follow the existing freight rail lines.
Always possible to build the high speed rail and then run another connector down the Salinas Valley between Monterrey and Santa Barbara on to Thousand Oaks. (Following HWY 101 basically) Political opposition that is probably bigger than the geography though.
I’m under the impression that the US public want cars not trains and even the current tech celebrity’s vision is to have self driving cars that work together as if they are train carriages and go in a tunnel as if they are metro train carriages.
In the rest of the world, people are fine with ride sharing.
People want cars not trains because current trains are such an awful experience. This wouldn't necessarily be the case if trains were improved to the standards of some other countries.
I suspect Americans think trains are an awful experience not because of the trains, but because there will be other people on the trains. It's one part "don't make me interact with a human," and one part "white people don't ride busses."
It might also be one more part actually creepy people, but I bet most folks don't get that far into their evaluation.
Yep! pee seats for starters, no bathrooms (hence the pee seats), not grocery shopping friendly (load up the old trunk), weed smell (I think this is more of a 2009 and later issue at least in the West), and then there's the spooky people, knife attackers, the guy that keeps sneezing, late arrivals, early departures (miss the train?)... anyhoo. I think I just about killed it.
I understand this for inside a city, using a car is more pleas sent then sharing a bus or metro with strangers but when you travel a long distance you use a plane so all the comfort is gone, it would be better to have a high speed train , you still share it with strangers but if you are rich you can afford better accommodations including beds, you can walk and stretch your legs and there may even be spots for smokers. Maybe the average person travels only a few times with a plane so he can endure it.
Even between cities. For a while I was driving between Portland and Seattle pretty often, and the traffic was always awful! I would love to be able to take a HS train.
I certainly think it's better to be stuck in a traffic jam and sit in your own car than stuck in a traffic jam inside a packed vehicle full of other (sometimes extremely unpleasant) people.
The simple truth is, transportation projects are not created to solve problems but instead of pay off political affiliates, be they donors, family members, political parties, or the unions. Democrats have no more interest in high speed rail or energy independence than Republicans and for the same reason. Oh they will pay lip service saying otherwise but you can see the results of all those years they have made their claims and promises.
The elected and appointed officials of both parties serve their parties first. The party is more important than any one elected official and certainly more important than the voters.
high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world. the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless. In an authoritarian state like China the state can tell people were to live which makes it far easier to put services where those people are. Let alone the one item ignored is that much of the population does not travel long distance and that holds true for many countries. So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do and it makes a great jobs program and political payday as well
> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world.
This isn't true. High speed rail is alive and well in Europe. Geography, politics and history are all significant factors that you can't explain so easily.
> the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless
Highly speculative. Nothing beats rail for capacity to move a lot of people around quickly.
But there are plenty of chinese infrastructure projects that have languished for lack of use. Look at the olympic venues. Once the novelty of ribbon cutting is over, once the recuring costs start piling up, this project too may slow down.
Chinese airspace is already incredibly congested and unreliable. They just had to build a new 100-million capacity airport for Beijing because of a lack of capacity at the existing airport.
The alternative to not continuing to build up rail is that people start not making trips within China due to the difficulty. (Obvious grandstanding projects like HSR to Urumqi and Lhasa not included.)
China has about 30000km of highspeed rail. Pretty sure that counts as widespread. Sure, it's going at a leisurely 250–350km/h, not the 600-1000km/h from the article. But I don't think anyone claims that each train has to go 1000km/h from now on.
It is time but also energy. At 1000kph a train (at sea level) has massively more drag than an a380 at altitude. Even on electric, these things may have a greater carbon and financial cost than proponants want to admit.
An electric train can have near-zero carbon footprint, because electricity can be generated from nuclear fuel, sunlight, wind.
An electric airliner is still unattainable. Synthesizing jet fuel using electricity is of course possible, but must be massively less efficient than using that electricity directly in electric motors with efficiency > 0.95 and recuperative braking.
The carbon footprint of building the railway, likely with massive amounts of concrete to use to support the rails, and the steel for the rails (to say nothing of maglev infrastructure) — that's going to be huge. Building a pair of airports should be much less expensive.
Nearly every country’s Olympic venues fall into disuse. That’s one reason why the Olympics are probably best held in the US or UK or France, etc. where countries already have the resources. When countries like Greece or China built these resources they basically went into disuse immediately after. Even the Olympic village built in Atlanta cost more to refurbish than it would hlikely have taken to build from scratch, because these things are built in tight deadlines, and only really need to last about 2 weeks, so all sorts of shortcuts which make them unviable for non olympics use end up being taken to get them done by the deadline.
That's strange, because the olympic stadiums are perfectly fine, holding concerts, sport events and the likely routinely. I wonder where people got the idea that Beijing Olympic Stadiums are dilapidated, it's more like the exact opposite.
All of the venues used for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games are used extensively, the only two I don't personally know if they are used extensively are the Whistler Sliding Centre, and the Whistler Olympic Park.
Canada Hockey Place (aka Rogers Arena): Vancouver Canucks NHL team home stadium and concerts.
Cypress Mountain: Very popular local mountain for ski/board and snowshoeing.
Pacific Coliseum: Used for PNE, concerts, and events.
Richmond Olympic Oval: Popular skating rink
UBC Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre: Amateur sports teams and other events.
Vancouver Olympic/Paralympic Centre (aka Hillcrest Centre): Now used as a rec center.
Whistler Creekside (aka Whistler Blackcomb): The go-to location for ski/boarding nearby.
Whistler Olympic Park: Unsure.
Whistler Sliding Centre: Unsure.
> All of the venues used for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games are used extensively
Vancouver seems like an exception though. Canada is a wealthy country where the average person is likely to participate in sports (skating, hockey, skiing) that facilities were built for.
Also they didn't have to build new ski resorts, since the area already had some of the best ski resorts in the world.
It's a very different scenario in a country where people have far less discretionary income to spend on sporting venues.
> advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless
It makes a lot more sense to have a self driving car drive you to the high speed rail station, and then drive you from the train station to your final destination. Self driving cars don't run at 160+ mph, but high speed rail does.
> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel
Yes, the 'bygone days' of maglev trains. I don't know if you've ever travelled in Japan or China but the convenience and comfort of high speed rail easily surpasses flying. And in many cases, so does the speed.
In most normal countries, rail is critical transport infrastructure. It's not a conspiracy.
Stretch your legs, go to any one of the several bathrooms at any time, hang out in the pantry car and even get a proper meal. Store all the luggage you want. Arrive just 20 minutes before the departure and still have time to laze around. Board/deboard in the center of the city rather than 40kms in the outskirts.
The benefits of rail over air are absolutely endless. And I haven't even mentioned the lower carbon footprint of electric rail (you can make electricity from renewable sources. Can't make jet fuel).
Agreed. I regularly use high speed trains for every journey up to 4 hours, maybe 5.
I've been on vacation in China in 2015. I preferred the high speed train over the standard delay of one or two hours because of airspace traffic congestion.
It is on the east coast. It doesn't always work, and it's a pretty crappy experience, but there isn't an alternative for moving that many people around the Northeast corridor.
> yep - once u factor in the TSA body shakedown and traffic to airport, then it about evens out air travel.
That's a problem that will be replicated exactly for boarding a train destined to travel at 278m/s.
The consequences for a major security failure on a high speed train are, if anything, more dire than those for even a very large passenger aircraft. An 800,000kg barely-subsonic chain of rigid torpedoes barreling through dense population centres is serious business.
I get that it's moving fast, but what's the specific threat model? Terrorists hijack the train and somehow drive it off the tracks? Presumably it's easy enough to secure the "cockpit". They could blow it up, but is that dramatically worse than blowing up a train moving 50 mph (genuine question, I'm not sure about the physics)? Especially as these trains don't carry fuel, I can't imagine a tragedy on the scale of 9/11.
> But is that dramatically worse than blowing up a train moving 50 mph
Yes, it is extremely bad when 60-100 ton railcars are being thrown around like toys, at nearly the speed (about 30m/s slower than most .45 ACP) some handguns fire bullets.
If the goalposts move as fast as these trains are marketed to move, I'm sure we could find all sorts of things worse than the already terrible tragedy of a deliberate derailment, explosion, or sabotage of a high speed train.
> You can’t really hijack a train to hit a specific building, as you can with a plane.
Setting aside hijacking, which would not be the mechanism for a train attack anyway, the more likely attack on an airplane is suicidal self destruction at this point I would think, with all the new mechanisms in place.
If TSA is this silly with planes, given the relative lack of attractive plans open to attackers now, what makes you think they won't get even sillier with trains than they already have.
As for hitting a specific building, that depends: does your high speed rail line pass near any attractive targets? If the train is 800,000kg (not unreasonable I think?) and is travelling at the rated 280m/s or thereabouts, that's about 31GJ (please check my math) or 7.5 ton TNT equivalent of sheer momentum that can be convinced to continue travelling in an undesirable direction.
Seems like it may be a bit of a risk, at least enough that somebody could be convinced to thoroughly screen passengers.
What makes (high-speed or normal-speed) rail a success is a population density. A train moves a lot of people, that's its point. For it to work, these people need to work close to it, and move along it often.
Passenger railways make sense in places where one metropolis is close to another, and to yet another, etc, with suburbs commuting to these cities, too. This is what you see in Europe like Germany / Netherlands / France, this is what you see in central Japan, this is what you see in coastal China; all these places have very high population density, It works to an extent in US Northeast. All these places have dense and working passenger railways.
But they are a major investment that needs to be repaid, so they need a lot of use. I don't think I'd pay twice as much to get from NYC to Philadelphia twice as fast (say, 45 minutes instead of 90-100), and even 4 times as fast (say, 20 minutes). It would cost comparable to hiring an small airplane already, because there's no such a mass daily ridership. And most places in the US are much lower density. Airplanes are more economical over large sparse spaces.
But on the other hand, if there were a cheapish, fast way to get from say Philadelphia to NYC, I might trade my $3500/mo Manhattan apartment for a $2000 new construction rental in Philly and take the train to work every day. 45 minutes is a shorter commute than many people have from Queens or Brooklyn.
> the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless.
Fully autonomous self driving cars are decades away[0] - assuming 15-20 years that about 20% of one's lifetime, developing rail is only a few years effort.
I do not understand how electric cars would doom rail.
Electric improves the flexibility of BRT, for one - you can run buses underground with lower ventilation requirements and without running overhead cables. Extrapolate "better BRT" to whole highways and dedicated streets running articulated self-driving buses(a far easier task than open-road self-driving) - and you can achieve a lot of the things that rails do, for cheaper. The things that can't be done with that model, the biggest capacities and the highest speeds, are the things that are most in need of a huge subsidy anyway.
Electric is also giving ferryboat transit a new lease on life in terms of energy cost/emissions impact. The SF area fleets have ordered a few electrics already - and they've been expanding service, adding new terminals. It's a return to an older model for regional transit and it has plenty of upsides, with the big caveat of needing a viable coastline.
Between those two, I think you have the model for a lot of future transit infrastructure. Regardless I would also not claim rail is "doomed".
> air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world
And it has the problem of a massive carbon footprint to go along with it. If we are serious about combatting climate change, we need to find ways to move as people with as much throughput and convenience as airplanes today without burning as much fossil fuel.
Given that electric commercial flight is a way off, high speed electric trains are an existing technology to achieve that.
> Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins?
Yeah I can: approximately nothing. What exactly would you do with such a train? Neither LA nor San Diego have meaningful downtowns or local transit, so you'd still need a 45 minute drive on each end to get from/to where ever you're actually going. It's a 2.5 hour drive door-to-door today, so now you've just got a three-seat journey where there was once a one-seat trip, to maybe shave 30 minutes off journey time.
Moreover, there's no technology that could build such a train. LA to to San Diego is 200 kilometers. It would almost certainly need to make stops like Anaheim, Irvine, Oceanside, etc.. Oh, by the way, there's a mountain range between the two. Even state-of-the-art HSR would struggle to maintain 200 km/hour over the entire route. So now your train ride is an hour, and you've actually saved no time.
Something like Tokyo, NYC, London :) That is, you get off the high-speed train there, and immediately take a local subway train that takes you where you need in 10-20 minutes, or a taxi takes you where subway won't. Looking for parking is never your problem.
They were built before environmental regulation was implemented, the same as the US interstate system. None of those could be built today as cheaply or easily as pre-1970s. If at all.
None of them could be built today as cheaply, but all the projects built in those countries today are still dramatically cheaper than in the U.S., despite similar or even greater labor and regulatory costs. This has been well reported. The U.S. pays 2x or 3x more than comparable projects in comparable countries.
Ultimately the costs come down to politics. You can see the problem repeated dozens of times in this discussion--"I'd support X if and only if X was exactly what I wanted". That's not a recipe for compromise, and compromise is fundamental to efficient group decision making.
The costs balloon not because labor is too expensive, but because we take too long to build things and are constantly changing things as we go along. Regulations don't get in the way because they're overwhelmingly difficult or costly; regulations get in the way because the regulatory processes are hijacked and abused to stone wall projects.
We can't get things done in the U.S. because our politics are broken, especially at the national level, but even at the local level.
Looking at the dates when the high speed lines (AVE) were opened in Spain [1], save for one (1992), all the rest were opened after 2003, and most were opened in the last decade.
France keeps extending their network too... Same with other countries.
Then I have a misunderstanding of EU regulation on the matter. Is it entirely new right of way construction or upgrades?
In the US the last giant scale build-out was permitted before the EPA or Army Corps of Engineers had any regulatory teeth on the matter. Most projects since have been lane additions or incremental extensions. Loops have been built, but are politically easier since they only need to make one metro area happy. There's only been a handful of "new" interstates built since then (at a substantially higher cost). Much of the originally planned interstate system (that was to be a later phase) just never got built.
Yes they can tell people to move in the name of public development. But it’s not like they just kick people out without compensation. My wife’s grandparents’ and parents’ had to move. The government provided them with new housing. The new houses are more modern, with toilets and running water, which they didn’t have before. The new houses are located in better places. Oh, and they have houseS now — previously they only had 1. Their standard of living improved.
That is a completely different scenario than what would be the case in many areas of the US.
In 2012, Amtrak estimated $151 billion to upgrade the Northeast Corridor (Washington DC to Boston). Adjusted for inflation that is about $168 billion now. I would assume that the actual price if we proceeded would be much more as I've never heard of a large project like that in the US coming in at the budgeted number.
It is a huge amount of money that can't realistically be recovered by train fares so you have to ask yourself is that the best way to allocate tax dollars? There are lots of other things I would choose to spend $168 billion on and one of them would be not collecting those tax dollars in the first place...
>Infrastructure is easy (and cheap) when you don't have to respect property rights or do environmental impact studies.
Is there no national/public interest exception in the constitution just for such cases? Where you take someone land buy you pay or give equivalent land back(I know some people would like to get rich quick in this situations)
In the US? There is, but it's not always politically popular, and fair market value is required, which gets expensive when tearing down buildings and moving highways in Urban areas.
The bigger obstacle is the environmental impact study, which includes a social justice component. That keeps you from using the cheapest routes, as cheap land usually means it disproportionately affects minorities.
China's situation is similar to the US in the 1800's when land was basically free and railways were being built everywhere. There is little US land availability today to build infrastructure on, same issue in a lot of europe
It is incredibly hard to get things done in a fully functioning democracy. Ask us Indians and we know how difficult it has been for us to build any large scale project. First time a road building project was outsourced to private contractors was in 1995. People who wanted to use the road were asked to pay a fee (toll). There was an outcry from media, other political parties. That government lost power and only came back into to power 20 years later and no other big projects happened until then. Right now in Mumbai, one of the densest urban clusterfuck on the face of planet is resisting a rail project which will elevating pains for 5 million people everyday, saving enormous amount of carbon, reduce pollution. And all the resistance in for cutting down 2700 trees, most of which will be transplanted.
See in Australia how difficult it has been to build a high speed rail between Melbourne - Sydney one of the busiest domestic route in the world.
Edit - I dont mean to imply democracies are bad. It is just that things are hard to get done.
Currently living in California, and I feel the main opposition to things like this are the constituents.
Everyone in the Central Valley will simply vote against whatever California wants to spend money on unless if overwhelmingly benefits them, or “hurts” those in the cities.
I know this isn’t the only reason the high speed rail project was canned, but those in the Centra Valley opposed it unless it connected some stretches like Fresno <-> Bakersfield together.
Been in New York City for the last ten years, so I certainly understand where you’re coming from. A few points:
1. Corporate income taxes don’t generate much revenue, and the revenue they do bring in is even smaller relative to the amount of harm and economic distortion it causes. It really only carries on because it’s a useful political football and because having it appeals to a certain sense of “fairness.” There’s really no correlation between corporate taxation and infrastructure, and we might even be better off without the former altogether.
2. The US does spend a lot every year on infrastructure, but it gets relatively little bang for its buck, especially in comparison to places like China; even other advanced economies (France, UK, etc.) seem to be better at controlling costs for these types of projects.
3. We also spend a ton of money every year on precisely the wrong type of infrastructure. The Federal government, in addition to every state and local government, spends enormous sums every year on not only maintaining existing roads, but also widening, adding lanes, or even building new ones. In fact I remember reading that something like one out of every two dollars spent on roads goes to build new ones, even as people decry that the government isn’t adequately maintaining the roads that already exist. That’s insane - but it’s tied up in how funds are allocated, cost sharing agreements, etc. that often comes out of Congress. In short, the Feds will pick up an enormous proportion of the tab for building new state and local roads, but contribute very little to maintaining them. It should be easy to see, then, that building new roads is often more lucrative for contractors, politicians, governments, etc. than simply maintaining what they already have.
4. All the money we just talked about spending on roads is money that was not spent on upgrading sewers, water, power, public services, and everything else that help support denser urban areas like New York. So in effect, we are starving economically vibrant cities like NY of federal funds at the same time we subsidize the continued expansion of suburbia, none of which have the density required to make massive investments in things like railroads anywhere close to economically viable.
>I hate the fact that an autocratic and repulsive Government is showing up the US
I hate that you use this term. Every government is like a flawed human being. I see it as a spectrum but HN sees it as The USA way or the HighWay.
The autocracy and maintenance of that autocracy is exactly how the Chinese government can show up the US. A centralized government with no ulterior profit agenda is exactly the central pillar to make unbiased decisions without resistance.
> while the US govt is dropping taxes for the biggest companies
California has no shortage of funding for the transit. The failed bullet connection had more funding then the system in China that carries 10x people. Stop blaming "evil corporations" for failures of local and State governments.
As a former rail fan, I’ve gotten over it. We don’t build infrastructure because we don’t value it. Not just in a “we don’t want to spend the money”—but we don’t want to make the political compromises necessary to make it easy to build infrastructure.
Dropping taxes on companies has nothing to do with it. Many European countries have lower corporate taxes than we do, and no OECD country raises significant revenue from corporate taxes. It’s a red herring and a distraction. The issue is we have a political system that makes infrastructure enormously more expensive and hard to build than in Europe (much less China). In Maryland, people are lobbying to get light rail stations torn down that have already been built! The average time spent in “environmental review” for a government project is 5 years, and its really just an opportunity for a small minority to hold up and delay infrastructure projects. But that system is a reflection of our values. We don’t build things because we would rather prioritize other values.
That is what it is. We are good at other things! We’re good at things like Silicon Valley, that don’t require centralized cooperation and people falling in line. Lots of countries have the political discipline to build rail. But there is no other Silicon Valley! (What more needs to be said about why California doesn’t have rail, beyond noting that the state’s most significant industry is based in the suburbs/exurbs of an otherwise second tier city?)
"So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing."
"If California was a country"
You (US) are now segueing into the introspective phase of Empire - that's when you learn a few lessons. When you realise that deploying more (aircraft)carriers than everyone else combined is simply a thing or spending way more on cough defence than anyone else is a thing as well, and it isn't as important as some other things.
Anyway, I hope your journey from Irvine to Los Angeles was at least comfortable.
> So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing.
The US is a country of checks and balances. Viewed differently, it's easy to obstruct changes. On average this works well, as it's far more likely for any random change to be bad rather than good. The unfortunate side effect is that many good changes don't happen, because it's so difficult to overcome all the "checks and balances".
In an authoritarian regime, changes edicted from the top encounter very little opposition. In post-Mao China, lots of these changes were wise, but not all. In the majority of the authoritarian regimes though the story is a bit less rosy.
Can we have our cake (checks and balances) and eat it too (more good changes get done) ? That's a tough question, I personally don't have the answer. But it seems more likely that once China builds a larger network of high-speed rail, the US would get some type of competitive impulse, and start investing in this too. One can only hope ...
The presenter and quite a few commenters seem to have a built-in bias towards rail. Don't get me wrong. I love a good train journey and prefer it to flying when it's competitive. But the video tries to be an optimistic take on what a cold eye could only describe as totally mad and dysfunctional government.
The situation according to the video can be summed up like this:
• China has built tons of high speed rail very fast, this is amazing!
• But they do it because their internal airlines suck incredibly badly.
• There are only three carriers, none of which are budget. Planes are on time only about 65% of the time, which is a staggeringly low figure. The cause is enormous congestion in the air leading to air traffic control frequently denying takeoff rights.
• This bizarre situation occurs because the Chinese Army controls almost all the airspace above China and refuses to let civilian flights anywhere except a few corridors.
• Rather than get the army under control and open up flying to competition, China decided to build tons of railways instead.
• These railways are all heavily subsidised. Theoretically some in the east are profitable, but this is more than offset by railways built along totally unviable routes. For one route the ticket sales don't even cover the cost of electricity, let alone construction debt.
• Because HSR requires long straight lines without sharp curves, HSR railway stations are often as far away from city centres as airports are (France has this problem too). That eliminates one major advantage of rail over flying.
The Chinese taxpayer is forced to pay for these economically insane projects because it's all a part of Beijing's control (or oppression) of Xinjiang and Tibet.
For vague and to me inexplicable reasons, Beijing thinks building expensive and slow railway lines between outer region cities that don't have much travel demand will somehow prevent rebellions. The logic of this is not elaborated in the video, but it's hard not to assume the railways are intended for future military use if there's a need to move lots of troops into these regions.
Now let's compare this to America, which according to Hacker News consensus is some terrible backwater in comparison.
America has perhaps the world's best domestic airline network. Competition is intense, prices are low, travel times are very low, planes travel freely in huge quantities and the airlines are (sorta) profitable without taxpayer subsidies.
America also has an extensive and heavily used railway network, but it's used for freight rather than passengers. This makes sense for all kinds of physical and economic reasons.
HSR doesn't really exist in America, but this isn't because American society is dysfunctional. It's because the massive subsidies and land clearance required are hard to justify when you have an excellent flight network, which operates just fine. Take away "suppress rebellion" and "the military causes 40% of flights to be delayed" as motivating reasons and suddenly the US decisions don't look so bad. Those checks and balances seem to be working out pretty well.
Whatever baggage China had, France and Japan didn't, and they are criss-crossed with high speed rail. A flight from Paris to Marseille takes 1:20h and starts from $133 and a TGV takes 3:09 and starts from $35 [1]. I would take the train any time.
I personally take the train even if the comparison is not that clear cut. Recently I travelled with Acela from NYC to Boston for journey time of about 4h. The flight time would only be 1:05, but considering the security wait time and the airport to city center time, you'd probably end up around 3-4 hours depending on luck. Oh, and luck is what you don't want do depend if you can avoid it.
Unfortunately, Acela is an HSR only in name. But allow one to dream that Acela could run at 200mp (like the Shinkansen or TGV) and extended all the way to Miami. That would be about 6:15h travel time vs 3h for the flight time. Many, many people would take the train without blinking.
Not sure if we should start talking CO2 emissions, where I feel the airplanes don't stand a chance.
Both French and Japanese HSR were/are financial black holes that bankrupted the relevant railway companies. French TGV is nice but again, stations are often far outside the city centres. Compared to flying (profitable on its own) it's not at all clear any of these countries made the right decisions.
WRT CO2, it's not quite so clear cut unfortunately. Planes emit more only because they travel further. Mile for mile they aren't that different these days.
Only if powered entirely by non-emitting power sources, which requires you to assume nuclear power creates no pollution. Not much CO2 I'll give you that, but no pollution, not the case.
If we were to be in a debate class, and you were assigned to argue in favor of electric trains, I'm sure you would point out that in a single month California build more than enough solar capacity to power all 16 trains for the Phase 1.
Every month for the next 5 years, California is projected to build an average of 250 MW solar (15 GW overall [1]). The highest power TGV: 12.24 MW [2]. It's in fact enough to power 20 trains.
It‘s worth noting that new is not necessarily better. Maglev is extremely rare because standard high speed rail can boost existing rail services; for example, TGV trains use the legacy rail network to reach Nice. With a maglev rail system anywhere that isn‘t directly connected requires a transfer.
I hear you. I lived in SoCal for many years and fought the traffic on all those routes you mentioned. When I came back from trips to countries with working mass transit the awareness was even greater.
But I think it's a hard problem in the U.S. Autocratic governments just decide to do something and plow over anyone who gets in their way. The country I live in now is actually starting to lay track for a high speed rail system to connect the centrally located capital and major outlying cities, and all the way to the northern and southern borders. It did take a while to get started, because everyone had to decide how the contracts would be divided up among their cronies and how the kickbacks would be paid. But it is getting done, because if anyone stands in the way the government declares a threat to the security of the country and sends in the soldiers.
From what I remember reading, the train infrastructure in the East would never survive here in the States because our urban and rural layout structures are fundamentally different, meaning there are some large scale construction projects that are not feasibly profitable here, likewise in the East.
Hearing this make me quite proud of the UK. Even though we have old Victorian-era infrastructure we still manage to run a decent intercity train system that can get you from Scotland to London in 4 hours or so. Much more pleasant than travelling by plane without the hassle of airport security.
Yes, you even managed to build Crossrail, which is a huge project by European standards. It shows that even within a city of so expensive property, if there is a will, proper infrastructure can be built.
infrastructure literally and figuratively underlays parts of society.
Boston has infrastructure problems to a degree Seattle doesn't experience because when the Seattle core burned to the ground, it was rebuilt in some critical areas with newer infrastructure and thinking.
If you were a Bostonian or Chicagoan in that era, you were patting yourself on the back because your town hadn't burned in 20 years, and would not again. Today Seattle residence scratch their heads at some of the problems that Chicago and Boston have.
Similarly, residents of Tokyo were 'forced' into cellphones because even the 'burbs were so dense that installing new data lines was hugely expensive. 2-4 times the cost of a cellphone for a year. We were sucking down DSL+ speeds and looking jealously at their cool phones.
> Similarly, residents of Tokyo were 'forced' into cellphones because even the 'burbs were so dense that installing new data lines was hugely expensive
And yet now Japan has a nationwide FTTH grid to the point where the telco has discontinued new ADSL signups.
i didn’t mean to imply that installed base trumps all other concerns. It creates back pressure that takes a really big reason to overcome. Installing a small bundle of fiber optic is so much more interesting than giant bundles of 10MB copper that can’t even handle the entire neighborhood. I’m sure that will overcome friction in a lot of places.
I’m wondering if part of that exorbitant cost was installing repeaters. Which fiber has much less need of.
No need to get glossy eyed over China. Yes, there are advantages to a totalitarian regime where the population isn’t allowed to own land. There are also modern day concentration camps and mass organ harvesting.
Unfortunately you don’t really get one without tending to get the other.
Almost any European country has, with a much smaller economy, better social wellbeing/coverage and a better high speed rail infrastructure (perhaps with the exception of the UK, unless they commit to HS2) so I'm not sure the comparison you should be making is China.
You don't need a totalitarian regime to get modern infrastructure. That's just a ridiculous statement.
Even without the HS2 the UK's train system is quite good. The main gripe from users is it costs a lot.
Eg. looking just now London to Manchester takes 2hr and costs £88 single. I think most brits think I'm not paying £90 for a single I'll drive (3 or 4 hrs), rather than I need it to be 30 min quicker - lets drop $100bn on a new line.
Few years back there were stories about officials removing graveyards to give way for industrial developments. It's really easy to get things done when one only need to answer to above, not below.
I've tried to dig for references, but it's very difficult to find discussions 2+ years back, let along official news.
There was a time in the west when we build the infrastructure we watch decaying today. I don't think we had totalitarian regimes, concentration camps and involuntary organ harvesting back then.
The USA's rail system is shit because of lack of investment, and misaligned incentives. It's cheaper to fly, or drive, than to invest in rail, even though rail is very efficient (and i suspect, more environmentally friendly than either of the above).
Rail, at the utilization rate that is observed in the real world in the US, is actually less efficient than a 2-passenger automobile, per passenger-mile.
Note that average real-world occupancy rates of vehicles is 1.5, so that is not to say that rail is more efficient than automobiles. But merely 33% more efficient per passenger-mile than automobiles at the current fleet mpg of 25mpg, which to me was very surprising.
At 60mpg and above (EVs in particular) the automobile at existing occupancy rates is more efficient than rail per passenger-mile.
Part of the challenge with rail efficiency is that it's a fixed point-to-point transit and not a dynamic door-to-door transit. So getting from Point A to Point B has significant wasted overhead distance traveled.
By the time they started planning the bullet train, that was long in the past. This is what the surroundings would have looked like when the bullet train started.
> didn't they say that when they arrived 400 years ago
Didn't x say y 1,000 years ago?
You're talking about different people: literally, morally, culturally - in most every way in other words. What does the average American today have to do with someone that came over from the British Empire in September 1620? The Pilgrims were not a mixture of German, African, Mexican and Chinese. Today is not 400 years ago.
Japan has great high speed rail, without cutting corners and even with much weaker eminent domain powers. There are other factors at play here. Why is building rail infrastructure 5x more expensive in the US than it is in continental Europe?
If either of these things were actually the factors blocking high speed rail in the US, Europe wouldn’t have trains either. Eminent domain exists, and US infrastructure only feels old because we never spend money on it.
That's not exactly accurate. Western Europe installed its high-speed rail decades ago. They could not do it today. The US also could have done it in the 1960s or 1970s and made a disastrous decision not to.
You can see proof of that in the fact that Western Europe is barely maintaining its infrastructure properly today. Their spending on such has frequently fallen below US spending levels as a share of GDP.
That's even while having the ability to raise incredibly cheap - often negative yield - debt. Germany refuses to spend and it is starting to badly need infrastructure spending.
EU infrastructure spending as a share of GDP is at 1.8% - 1.9%. The US is at 2.3% - 2.5%. In Greece it's 1.1% (it used to be over 2%). Italy is seeing a similar problem right now as its infrastructure crumbles and they have to fight over spending rules constantly.
From the World Economic Forum's competitiveness report looking at 1998-2017 infrastructure spending and results:
EU and Eurozone spending on infrastructure has widely been below proper maintenance levels since the great recession a decade ago. The EU as a whole needs to spend a lot just to catch up to where it should have been right now with its basic infrastructure.
They aren't doing that, and they would build high-speed rail today? There is good reason to be skeptical of that premise.
"Europe’s spending on infrastructure at ‘chronic’ low level"
"Spending at 20-year low threatens region’s prosperity, EIB report warns"
"According to Statista, the percentage of GDP spent on infrastructure for UK, France and Germany ranged between 2% and 2.2% in 2013 marginally below USA who has been spending 2.4%."
Note: it's not good to be marginally below the US on infrastructure spending in any regard.
The US doesn’t really have problems cutting corners when it comes to safety and pollution as well. For safety, look at the standard US power outlet and compare its safety with practically any other outlet in the world, of which all of them are considerably safer (albeit at the expense of being more complex and/or larger). For pollution, look at the current US Government actions.
>For safety, look at the standard US power outlet and compare its safety with practically any other outlet in the world, of which all of them are considerably safer
You judging the U.S for something they did first is only proving the point. It'd be great if we could up our voltage from 120 and change the plugs, but after a point it's just too expensive to change. And it's not as if tens of thousands are dying due to 3 prong outlets...
> Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week
My understanding is in China the government owns all the land to begin with, you lease it from them. But I guess in this case it would be "your lease is terminated, thanks"
I understand why there is no high speed rail. I can jump on a plane and get there in 1 hr for about $50-75 each way. I also have a choice of 3 different airports around the bay and similar options in LA. San Diego is just another 15 min by air.
>Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins? LA to San Fran in an hour and a half?
well, that train railway and its stops and other infrastructure would have to be build over somebody's lands/homes - the somebody's lives would have to be significantly impacted against their will. "The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few"? Especially that in practice those "Many" are frequently just some other, more influential, "Few".
>an autocratic and repulsive Government
that is a one [brutally] efficient way to outweigh the needs of the few ...
> So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing.
What would be really depressing would be getting stuck with the hidden bill for this stuff. Sentiment like yours is why politicians can dangle the carrot of rail in front of the public for decades and keep cashing out.
It's just not that great a choice of transport on most legs in the U.S; and most places where medium- and high-speed rail makes sense in the U.S. already have it, at some price that keeps it somewhat occupied.
I get that rail could be a lot better in the US, but I took a journey there by rail and was really impressed. Clean, prompt and easy.
My benchmark is New Zealand so keep that in mind.
I think the surprisingly simple bottom line is: Infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive (are you willing to pay 10'000 for every ride?) and the upside NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE to gauge.
Sure, I voted for the California high speed rail... mostly because I expected to move after a few years and not have to pay for it.. but even when I voted for it, I knew it was going to be a cluster...
What a bunch of BS. Communism is not team play. It's slavery and tyranny. The US has more team play than most places because people are free to pick their teams.
Communism is the ultimate team play. Even the ones that are not thrilled by the idea, are forced to join (torture, killings). Also in my country, there were almost no private property. When communists came to power the first thing they did was to steal all the valuable private goods.
When you pool all the resources together you can achieve much greater things. What ultimately happened was that the smart people really wanted freedom and if they don't have it they just stop contributing. Which is why communism China is not the same as the original communism because somehow they realized the flaws in the original design. Long term I believe China will not be the best overall due to this, but the bigger projects like this railroad, are much easier to achieve in any dictatorship.
The US has had a money hoarding problem for the last three to five decades.
You're not going to get very many high cost infrastructure problems solved when the government doesn't force the issue. Socialism is a red herring, the real greatest enemy of capitalism is the unregulated free market.
That't not an excuse. You can build infrastructure without violating peoples rights. It may be more difficult but definitely doable. Look at Japan or Europe. This is a political issue based on a missing long term agenda.
What? The US has the ability to repossess land under Eminent Domain, and it can raise taxes to pay for construction labor (a roundabout way of compelling people to labor for the government). That's not the issue here.
It is not reasonable to equate the rules regarding eminent domain in the US with the effort required by the Chinese government to acquire land.
Nor is it reasonable to equate the complexities of raising revenue in representative government with the ability to direct expenses in a command economy as in China.
If your Federal Reserve stopping adding nonsense imputed and hedonic values to the tune of about ~$7 trillion to your economy's GDP, you would find yourself in second place.
Which might make help explain away your confusion :)
Not even in the slightest, but there was no CHINESE poster wondering why their CHINESE GDP couldn't fund bullet trains.
The poster was wondering why his/her USA GDP couldn't support bullet trains.
I was being helpful by pointing out that ~$7 trillion of USA GDP literally (in the old sense of the word) did not happen.
Unless you think that $7T of GDP that is assigned to mortgages on the half the houses in the USA that have no mortgage, bank fees on free accounts, fictitious prices of electronics, etc. are the same as the entire value of the Japanese economy…
GDP is a game that all countries play to try convince sovereign bond purchasers that the debt/GDP ratio is under control.
I am so glad California did not spend $80+ billion on the high-speed SF to LA rail project. It makes no sense. Flying from SF to LA would be faster than the train. Driving isn't that bad either and once you get to LA you need a car to get around. If you really want to take the train to LA there is already a beautiful route on Amtrak along the coast.
Take the Paris-Lyon TGV. For about 30$ minimum price, you get from city center to city center, 300 miles away in 2 hours.
There are trains every 30 minutes.
I did that Amtrak route (Coastal Starlight) recently and it just took so long. I'd rather take a bus next time. I won't be doing either, though -- I'll just fly. It costs the same anyways.
> I took the train once from Irvine to Los Angeles and felt I had gone back in time to 1980. This in one of the richest counties in the world (OC)
Have you considered that richness is not measured correctly? Since GDP is effectively consumption, the more a person consumes, the richer a country is. A thousand people driving 5 hours between LA and SF will make the country richer. Not the people, which China appears to be wanting to do.
My father in law can fly from Los Angeles to San Jose in an hour for $150 round trip. Not sure why we need to lay tracks all over the land when we have flying machines.
Not clear yet if this is the early stage of a global trend, and even it it is, it may take a long time to have an effect in the US, where there are fewer good alternatives.
If this is taken to its logical conclusion, everyone should drive. Trains are not more efficient than a the average car when measured in passenger mile per gallon equivalent. And trains are much less efficient when compared to a high MPG cars like a Prius.
Whats the matter with the Europeans? Don't they care about the environment?
Shame that article totally fails to measure what is actually important. It's not about energy efficiency, but about CO2 emmisions per passenger mile. In Europe, most trains are electric already. Around 50% of electricity in Europe is generated using renewables or nuclear, and this fraction is rapidly increasing. In France, Norway, Sweden and Austria, almost all electricity is renewable or nuclear. So electric trains cause very little CO2 emmisions in these locations. Electric cars are a medium term solution, but it's going to take a while to move the needle on CO2 emmissions, whereas trains can do so already. Large electric plans are a much more difficult proposition. The best bet there for decarbonization is probably to continue to use hydrocarbons, but to generate them from atmospheric CO2 using "spare" electricity from renewables, but that's going to cost a lot, make plane travel several times more expensive, and not likely to happen anytime soon. So, right now, in Europe, travelling by train rather than plane is a sensible call, and with high-speed rail, will usually take much less time than driving.
> Trains are not more efficient than a the average car when measured in passenger mile per gallon equivalent. And trains are much less efficient when compared to a high MPG cars like a Prius.
While the article you're quoting does indeed claim that is the case, it does have (Amtrak) in parentheses.
A Shinkansen eats 270,000 yen worth of electricity for a single trip from Tokyo to Osaka, and 1 kWh is 12-14.8 yen. A full train would seat about 1300 passengers.
So every passenger pays about 208 yen, which works out to about 16 kWh. To side-step awkward conversions, let's look at the electric cars with the best efficiency on https://pushevs.com/electric-car-range-efficiency-epa/, highway efficiency:
2019-2020 Jaguar I-Pace 29.1 kWh/100 km (5 passengers => 5.82 kWh/100 km per passenger)
2019 Tesla Model X 22.5 kWh/100 km (7 passengers => 3.21 kWh/100 km per passenger)
Tokyo-Osaka is 515 km by train, 506 km by car. So in the Tesla you'd use 16.2426 kWh per passenger, which is pretty much the same.
Here come the less reliable figures: this Yahoo Answers thread suggests Shinkansen are about 58% full on average. I don't have any data for cars, but I usually don't see many cars that are completely packed, but I have seen Shinkansen that were over-capacity.
I also have a feeling it would be pretty tough to attain this figure in the car. Occasionally you'd have to spend time in traffic jams, and it's a 5-6 hour ride anyway. Plus, if the Shinkansen were to go as slow as the car, it would probably use much less energy.
It is an option, I can't drive because of medical problems, long distance traveling in cars is also problematic when you have kids that get bad motion sickness.
You also need to consider the opportunities that cheap long distance travel gives you, A poor student like I was can travel to a far city to study and afford to come home each 4 - 8 weeks. Because the small cities are linked to bigger ones you get more students or better quality students in the big city. The nation has more educated people, the students from the small city also have to live so they will spend money in the big city, so the big city has an influx of money. The small cities don't have airports, the students are also poor enough so they don't own cars, have where to park them in the big city or afford the fuel.
I haven't looked at the particulars for this project, but typically the practical limit of high speed rail is 300-500 miles. Beyond that, it's cheaper and greener to fly.
If you aren't concerned with cheap or green, and want to focus on fast... Then high speed rail might be a better option until the TSA is involved.
I have some published LCAs at home, but the gist is that most US studies:
-assume improving existing infrastructure instead of new right of way and new track, which limits speed to ~125 mph
-calculate efficiency ignoring embeded energy/costs (fuel per passenger mile, instead of complete LCA)
-are based on unrealistic track usage. At some capacity a track can't hold anymore trains and you need a second track, while airspace for additional planes is flexible and almost free. Also the faster the train, the further they need to be spaced out, which typically reduces capacity.
-price subsidies such that ticket price per passenger mile is roughly $0.45 rural - $0.55 Urban, which matches airfare for shorter flights, but not longer ones. (500+ miles)
-that pricing is targeted because it correlates roughly to the service window where time of travel is roughly competitive with air travel, taking into account check-in time.
I can't find anything online that suggests air is ever cleaner than rail. The discrepancy is a factor of 20¹, so it would be surprising if circumstances overcame that, unless you are traveling across an ocean.
For idealized shorter range distances (300~350 miles) I've seen claims of 2x or 2.5x, sometimes up to 5x, but that's using full LCA, not just fuel per passenger mile. The embedded energy in ROW and track are significant, and it doesn't scale well (capacity wise) compared to air travel.
In favor of hsr, but still with some big assumptions and limited distances. The fuel factor is huge, but still relatively comparable between modes, and it's all heavily dependent on % of empty seats.
95% is extreme, but it's usually assumed to be in the 55-65% range for generic civil infrastructure, not hsr specific. Compared to that hsr is heavy on concrete and steel, so would be higher.
Embedded rail infrastructure costs are calculated based on near track capacity (amortized over 30-50 years, which is generally correct for civil projects), and typically near train capacity. Empty trains are much worse than empty airplanes, and if ridership isn't projected accurately pulling a train from a route doesn't reclaim any embedded costs of the track or row, while airline infrastructure can be completely reallocated. Multiply a miscalculated capacity by 50 years and it turns into a big number.
I'm about 2/10 so far on finding these papers I'm looking for today, but this one at least addressed ridership implications for the California project in terms of LCA.
And here's one comparing air to hsr in Europe, showing only 3%-20% gains by shifting passengers from air to rail, based on existing infrastructure, but using LCA assuming a %50 recyclable rate for rail.
Reason probably is that, at long distance, lower air resistance at height starts to count.
Also, it’s easier to move planes around than to move rail tracks around, so if a destination is popular for only a short time (say for the Olympic Games, or for the hajj (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdulaziz_International_A...), it may be energetically cheaper to build and (basically) discard an airfield than to build and (basically) discard a long rail track.
>Reason probably is that, at long distance, lower air resistance at height starts to count.
This isn't as big a factor as you might think. While older aircraft were optimized for design/cruise altitude, modern jets are designed to account for the imposed altitude restrictions and speed limits of departure and approach. They also have a much wider/efficient operating envelope, and due to improved logistics, are dispatched, loaded, and operated more appropriately wrt to flight plan profiles.
Modern passenger jets are incredibly efficient. 1000-mile rail ROWs take a ton of resources to maintain and capacity does not scale well, especially as speed increases.
Even the us high speed rail Association claims efficiency only up to ~1000 mile trips, and this is their own best case marketing claims. And they're fighting for the sub 125mph version using existing ROW.
This paper shows only about a 3% to 20% improvement in co2 per passenger mile by shifting air traffic to already existing hsr in Europe (200-800km trips, taking into account embedded energy, and assuming %50 will be recyclable, which I think is quite optimistic)
I’m not sure if it’s just lost in translation, but Wuhan to Guangzhou isn’t even 1000 km so I don’t know where they get the 2200 km they’re quoting. That’s likely a figure for GZ to Beijing.
I have used the high speed line between Wuhan and GZ (and through to HK) several times. It’s currently a 4.5 hour direct journey (once per day) or a 5 hour journey if you change at GZ or Shenzhen. The HSR is 300ish km/h at the moment and that route stops about 4-5 times along the way, off memory.
Aside, I also don’t know how much benefit 1000 km/h travel would bring. That’s an enormous energy requirement to accelerate up to such a speed only to stop 4-5 times along the way. 600 km/h would likely be much more realistic, because if you shorten the duration too much you run into the wall of needing to accel/decel constantly to make the stops.
Lastly, the HSR there is already capable of 350 km/h at least, but they limited it to 300 km/h after a massive derailment that caused a heap of fatalities years ago and never increased it back up again. It may be reading into it too much, but it may also be telling that they didn’t see the benefit of upping the top speed again even when considering the loss of face.
That's the big one. What HSR needs is not even higher top speed but some control breakthrough that allows much higher train frequencies in order to cut down on stops via more trains that can serve more specialized connections (e.g. the local/through etc). No idea what that breakthrough might be, perhaps something as crazy as rocket-assisted emergency braking.
If you go from Shanghai to Suzhou via HSR a train goes roughly every 15 minutes. Most trains going east go through Suzhou (since it is a major hub) and it is roughly 30 minutes away which is a decent distance so worth stopping for. The train only gets to maximum speed for about 15 minutes in the middle.
Why not aero braking? You could install little flaps actuated with hydraulics along the train. This could probably be part of the normal braking system. The amount of drag produced by something like this at 1000kmh would likely be very substantial.
Would be cool to make a system where the train could drop off tailing cars and redirect them to stops, and pick up new cars which are accelerated to a matched speed and then linked, removing need for the train to fully decelerate at intermediate stops.
Good point! You could have engines on the front and back cars, approaching a stop could make trailing cars apply slight breaking to create separation between them when going over 'router' tracks, allowing leave the train and new cars to enter in the gaps, then back engine could accelerate gradually to unify the train before switching main power back to front car.
I think 1000 km/h travel would bring HUGE benefits.
State-of-the-art high-speed trains at 350 km/h tend to waste less time than planes for distances shorter than about 1000 km if you include the time it takes to get to the airport, check-in, go through security, and all that nonsense. Beyond 1000 km journeys, planes tend to be more time-saving.
1000 km/h is about the cruising speed of an aircraft so if it were possible to achieve that with a train, it would no longer make sense to take planes for the same journey -- which would be HUGE plus for comfort for, say, trips between Europe and Asia. Imagine for a 10-hour journey that you could walk around freely, enjoy massive amounts of legroom, enjoy the views of Siberia, sleep in peace and quiet, dine at a dining table, and not have to be strapped into a seat all the time. For high-volume routes it is also likely to be lower-carbon in the long run than air travel, and at the very least, can be powered on something more sustainable and less polluting than jet fuel. The bulk of your environmental impact would come from laying the track itself, so it would have to be a route of extremely high tourism or business importance, e.g. Shenzhen-Shanghai-Beijing-Moscow-Warsaw-Frankfurt-Paris-London or some such. Or Los Angeles to New York.
As opposed to the countless survivors of most plane crashes.
Not to mention the one critical advantage of the train, run out of fuel or some breakdown, you just stop in the middle of nowhere, on a plane, it's likely a different ending unless flying near Hudson river with an amazing pilot.
High speed trains don't derail that often if built well. Modern high speed rail systems have better safety records than planes.
China's high speed rail system has had 1 accident with 40 deaths out of several billion passenger kilometers of trips, and that was involving a slower, older technology. The latest, fastest trains in China have not had any accidents to date.
Japan's Shinkansen has had 2 derailments in half a century of operation, one due to an earthquake and one due to inclement weather. Both incidents had zero injuries.
The European systems have had notably higher accident rates but still surpass the safety records of planes.
The article says that for 1000 km/h they would be using vacumn tubes. With vacumn tubes there's no air resistance and theoretically no need to continue adding power once you're at speed.
There are currently 61 high-speed trains from Wuhan to Guangzhou on most days (although to different stations in Guangzhou). The fastest one is now just under 4 hours.
Not fundamentally more efficient, UNLESS in a Hyperloop-like vacuum tube (as this one is). Let’s consider at near sea level.
At near sea level, the drag at those speeds is absolutely brutal. Airplanes win, although they’re harder to electrify.
If you extrapolate current Maglev designs to 1000km/h, for energy consumption per passenger mile is about 0.5kWh/(passenger-mile).
Airplanes are on the order of 100mpg/passenger, or 0.33kWh/(passenger-mile) even with the relatively low conversion of chemical energy to mechanical in a jet engine. An electric aircraft could get about 0.1-0.2kWh/(passenger-mile) with the same airframe if the battery chemistry is appropriate for that flight length. Improve the airframe, and <0.05kWh/(passenger-mile) is possible.
Length of electric flight is limited, but 1000km is possible with current chemistries. America’s near-term HSR routes are on the order of 500km, so electric flight is feasible.
This is why “Hyperloop” (or vacuum trains generally) are and were a good idea at the high end for high speed rail, in spite of all the mocking that Elon Musk incurred for the idea (which he/SpaceX popularized and funded student competitions for, although the idea is an old one). Otherwise airplanes win on efficiency.
The problem with planes is that they have to carry all their fuel/energy and to carry it costs more fuel/energy.
Most high-speed trains don't carry all their fuel with them. They get it from the network.
This will all change as battery technology improves but at the moment I cannot see it getting better trains.
That being said I expect that the 1000km/h speed will be like the Shanghai to Beijing track that got up to maximum speed a few times for the record and has since been reduced to make it more economical.
Even if this does happen and the train reaches 1,000 for a single trip and then drops back to a safer and more profitable speed of 600km/h or 800km/h it is still faster than what we have now and is a massive improvement.
American here. Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.
A lot of executives and politicians take the train between DC and NYC/Boston. The reason they do it is because the trains in the NE Corridor don't suck. This whole thing is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: build crappy trains, people hate them. Build nice ones, people like them.
This is a common misconception. Overall US transit riders earn about the same as drivers. In metro areas like Chicago, SFBA, or Washington DC, the median income of transit users is significantly higher than drivers.
>Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.
I disagree. This is a chicken-or-egg problem. Nobody is inherently against public transit. Having commuted in a few cities in North America, it's far more comfortable than sitting in traffic. If you have a good system, i think people would use it. The GO Train in the Greater Toronto Area is a good example; it's filled to the brim with white-collar city workers.
I knew plenty of people in the suburbs of Dallas who were against public transportation and any expansion of DART out to their towns. It was usually accompanied by talk of "that element" coming up from the city to rob their houses. It was fucking ridiculous, but unfortunately these people exist and need to be dealt with in order to get transit projects through.
The problem is DART needs the outlying towns to join it in order to run anything there. The NIMBYs simply pressured the town into not agreeing to join, so there was no way to do this.
Speak for yourself. In Chicago, we've got the metra [0] which goes to the far out suburbs (L goes to close ones [1]) and there are plenty of upper class people that ride it for their daily commute.
Other, and actually main, reason is that good public transport decreases cost of land, it is basically designed to do so: it makes more places liveable/jobs reachable, so there is effectively more land for the same amount of people. So everyone will vote against or they lose their pensions.
Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.
More and better public transport in EU? For same reasons: less democracy and less market economy. More government-owner land, larger fraction of renters who just want cheaper rents (and public transport gives it to them), and they vote in the right direction, less legal opportunities for NIMBYsm.
I'm not convinced that, as you say, decreasing cost of land is the main reason. A simple counterexample would be London which has great public transport and ridiculous prices of land. On the contrary, public transport projects like Crossrail actually increase prices of land and property in affected areas.
Now try to force Americans survive in the abysmal living conditions of the average Londoner. That city is absurdly overregulated, and expensive as hell.
> Now try to force Americans survive in the abysmal living conditions of the average Londoner. That city is absurdly overregulated, and expensive as hell.
“Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.“
> Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.
I'm just going to assume that you've never been to major Asian cities.
Very interesting conclusion there, "all countries with good infrastructure are not democratic" , it also contradicts the fact that you have public roads, you logic applies perfectly for that too.
I strongly disagreed with them on this particular thread, but I don't get why having pro-China views should be automatically considered "extremely suspicious"?
Obviously i am not "pro-China" lol. And i don't advocate actually destroying market economy and (less confidently), democracy.
All i am trying to show is that public transport in the U.S. is such failure only as an undesirable externality of strong market and democratic institutions. We should probably bear with it because trying to fix risks, or directly requires, breaking too many other, important things.
I would much rather live in the U.S. than God forbid, China. I still prefer EU where i do live which seems to be good middle ground. And yeah, in my place (Cyprus), public transport sucks, and mainly because of democracy/good institutions (taxi drivers union won't let improve buses) and high living standards (low density - most can afford a detached house with a big plot - but it makes buses routes long and not dense, and their ridership low).
For the same reason pro-rape views should be automatically suspicous. An important difference between the moral and intellectual domains is that there's such a thing as an 'innocent intellectual mistake' but there's no such thing as an 'innocent moral mistake'
You can gauge the insincerity of the project by the mendacity of the title. There is an area of Texas known universally as "Central Texas". The "Texas Central" project goes nowhere near it.
It's a rail line from Houston to Dallas. It's not going to happen, unless the legislature goes full bore socialize-the-losses and subsidizes it.
>> You can gauge the insincerity of the project by the mendacity of the title. There is an area of Texas known universally as "Central Texas". The "Texas Central" project goes nowhere near it.
This is an incredibly bizarre criticism. Perhaps you are bitter that the project will not benefit you immediately? I live in Austin, and I am a bit disappointed about that myself, so I sympathize.
One of the many state/public attempts to bring HSR to Texas was built on a "Texas T" route (or "Texas T-Bone", some branding like that) that would have lines from San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas all meet at Austin, so that if you wanted to go from Houston to Dallas, or Houston to San Antonio, it would go through Austin. Unfortunately as I recall (memory fuzzy, very open to correction) this was most recently attempted in the era of Republican Governors saying "F U" to any Obama administration money, even if it would help their state...
It is understandably harder for a private group to start off with a three-line rail network than a one-line rail network, than it would be for a group working with the federal government. Hence when Texas Central Railways that took up the banner, they settled on Houston to Dallas as the most profitable pairing of cities. This is evidenced partly by, at least in the past, that city pairing being the most profitable airline route operated by Southwest.
I followed some of the original proposals for routes, and some of them went through College Station directly, versus the chosen route, which goes through Grimes County stop with a rapid bus to College Station. I would have loved to see those happen, but it turns out they would have had many multiples more eminent domain issues. The current route minimizes private land issues by hugging an existing utility corridor as much as it can, while also balancing land that is easy to build on, and having lower environmental impact.
It may seem a bizarre take to you, however after decades of reading titles of legislative bills and "projects" it's a simple test whose results stand up over time. I use it all the time.
You can never say never, the Texas Leg. is notoriously susceptible to political influence by monied or powerful individual. But I doubt it.
It will also take support of several powerful people within the leg (the speaker, and Lt. Governor), as well as the Governor to get the eminent domain condemnations done without interference.
But land developers get local governments (most often), and sometimes the Texas government to use public funds to build roads to increase the value of land to be "developed" all the time. It's the main way that new roads get built around here. Then they use a "private utility district" (authorized by the friendly leg.) with taxing authority to fund the installation of streets and sewer, etc. and voila, now they can make billions selling houses. All without risking a dime. It's a nice gig using tax dollars to funnel money to millionaires, if you've got the right friends.
NIMBYs would block any of the eminent domain needed to build it. Not to mention infrastructure construction in this country is rife with corruption and incompetence. This results in HSR having massive price tags and taxpayers not wanting to foot the bill.
I assume there are already tracks between the major cities, probably used today mostly for materials and not people, so can't you put a new track near the existing one, this land would already have low value since trains are already passing there.
Those tracks you reference are owned by the freight companies, not the gov. Even a good chunk of the rail lines that Amtrak uses are merely being rented from the freight companies. The Northeast regional line that connects Boston -> NYC -> DC is one of the few lines in which Amtrak themselves own it.
Thanks, I did not know this fact. So the only hope would be then that the private companies would invest into improving the tracks or the government nationalize the tracks(buy them most probably).
The problem is that the freight operators habitually defer maintenance. Most trackage and crossings are in a poor state of repair. Updates would require fixing the backlog.
About 25 years ago in Jr High school we watched a brief propaganda video about maglev trains touting The Future. Corny music coupled with bold narration. It was as comical and sad then as America's progress on high speed rail since then.
Yeah - this is why I find that argument very specious. Florida has a higher population density than France but there's no TGV equivalent running from Jacksonville to Miami
It's only one of the arguments. Florida has neither the political incentive nor the restrictions on air traffic to put pressure on government to build these things.
But the excuse is wrongly used, nobody is expecting bullet trains in Alaska or low populated places. So mostly people/politics are to blame and not terrain or density.
1,000km/h is within what is conventionally considered transonic (965-1235km/h). I wonder how practical these speeds are without a containing tunnel, particularly on the ground where there is potential for damage to buildings, structures, wildlife, etc. from sonic booms. Additionally, as I understand it, reflecting objects and terrain at ground level increase the potential for generation of sonic booms at transonic speeds. Indeed, sonic booms are generated by trains today when going through tunnels where the air ahead of the train is constrained and compressed.
I'm not sure it's strictly necessary to have the tunnel be low pressure. It's nice for the sake of less resistance, but the speed of sound is actually lower at lower pressures, and so would more readily produce a sonic boom.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t necessarily that big of an issue for China. A lot of their HSR is grade-separated and not infrequently up on viaducts. It’s not a particularly big step in my mind to enclosing that.
Has anyone else here ridden the maglev in Shanghai out of the airport? My 2c is that it was awesomely fast and convenient.
BUT, I was a little unnerved by how much the train jostled at some points. It was like the supports for the track had sunk in some places leading to the tracks no longer being aligned.
Not really informed by anything concrete, but I think there’s a disaster waiting to happen there. China has nowhere near the safety culture I’m used to in the states.
Now the conventional cars of the Shanghai metro? I really with the west coast of the US had infrastructure like that!
From the Boeing 747 MAX incidents you can conclude that if there is a big pile of money involved then safety is a problem to be workaround of, though funny enough there are still people that blame the cause on the safety regulations, like if the regulations were not present then Boeing and the free market (with only 2 competitors) would solve the issues
I rode it ten years ago and it felt safe, I would be interested to know how safety would be for a 1000 mile trip where every inch of track couldn’t be controlled. An animal on the track, sabotage, ice, snow — there are a lot of factors that become very hard to control at those speeds and distances.
Rode it last year and it was fine. But i’m used to rail high-speed trains, so maybe that’s why i found it perfectly quiet and safe.
Another reason could be that it wasn’t the time of the day when it goes up to max speed ( it only reaches 400km/h on certain time of the day, some days only. other time it’s just 350 or something like that)
Land and labour get taken from plenty of Americans too— it's just usually for the benefit of wealthy private corporations rather than to advance a public good such as dignified, quality, low carbon mass transportation.
Not quite true, in China the government usually tries to compensate you fairly for your house and cannot "force" you to leave (although I'm sure it happens).
This is utterly false. They are usually compensated 3 times the market value. Simply ask common people in China, everybody wants their houses to be torn down by the government.
Sometimes the government cannot afford it, that's why you may see a block of hutong or city-village in a fancy CBD.
Please go to China and talk to people with no rights but lots and lots of dough because their land/houses got confiscated by the commies in order to build high rises, freeways, high-speed train tracks or whatever the Nazi government has conjured up. They are literally the envy of the young generation because they no longer have to work (that IMHO is indeed a problem). But alas they don't have rights whereas homeless people in San Francisco can defecate freely and indulge themselves in needles basking in the democratic sun.
Make no mistake I'm a staunch supporter of democracy and freedom and despise the fact that China is lacking in both probably as much as you do. But please get your facts straight and refrain from using your imagination to comment on a country you most likely have never been to.
I used Google maps in the past days to marvel about Beijing’s new airport, Daxing. If you look closely you see the train tracks that are being built southbound. You see that they are mostly straight, mostly on stilts (still being built) but further south they also cross through some towns - where lines of houses have been removed. You can see several camps along the route, probably for construction workers to live directly by the construction site (some farmland had to go for that) - judging from the number of buildings it must be 1000s of them. Then, close to the end, you see massive construction work for what seems to become a major transportation hub, similar to the express train stations in Xi’an (8 million people) or Shanghai Hongqiao (220000 passengers/day). Yet, there isn’t much around it - a few smaller towns and villages. A bit further south the tracks seem to end north of the city of Xiong. The first trains are scheduled to be run in 2 years.
It’s a glimpse of the next project in preparation: the megacity of Xiong’an, which is to be built until 2050 to complement Beijing and Tianjin, totalling an area of about 110 million people.
Im not sure anyone read this article through. It states an experimental 200km stretch of fullsize vacuum tubing is to be built by Hubei to validate low air resistance travel to 600/1000kph. The competition is the US/Germany and the build out will be in the next 10 years. So we are talking about hyperloops here..
A quick search shows hyperloop tt has 320m of 4m tubes and possibly by now a 1km section strung up on pylons for completion by end 2019 (in france).
Chinas maglev was a seimens tech transfer circa 2002, siemens / thyssenkrup disbanded their maglev company in 2008 after the munich line plan was abandoned.
So no one is interested in conventional maglevs, the cost per mile i imagine is not worth it. If you make it 1k kph however and reduce airport build spends this cost may change drastically.
If you can get your superconducter cooling sorted.
The headline should point out the train is in a vacuum tunnel.
It’s the same fundamental idea behind Hyperloop One and some of the other Hyperloop-related efforts, although of course the vacuum train concept has been around for a lot longer than since Elon Musk popularized it (And got a bunch of flak for doing so...).
If they can get vacuum tubes working cost effectively that would be amazing, no limit to max speeds then. I doubt they are practical currently. Low pressure Helium Oxygen mixture probably a better option, just enough Oxygen for humans to survive and enough Helium, for say 1/3 atmosphere pressure, would be far easier and cheaper to build/maintain and would still dramatically reduce friction/drag.
> Also, a China Railway Group engineer told Changjiang Daily that Japan, Germany and the US were also competing against China, trialing their respective ultrafast maglev trains based on various models of the superconducting maglev technology.
Uh, we are? I don't know of any successful maglev projects ongoing in the United States.
And this is awful. Planes pollute so much [1] and the experience of flying is awful.
They are absolutely unstoppable right now in the infrastructure industry. And not just in their own country, but even world-wide (except the western world). They are building train tracks EVERYWHERE.
I still think the US has hope for rail and high speed rail that won’t bankrupt everyone. If, and this is a huge if (bc people love their cars), the US can replace a lane or two of major highways between cities with a rail. This would avoid forcing people to leave their homes or have massive payouts for stubborn landowners. The highway infrastructure is a pretty reasonable layer to build on as many highways already take close to the hypotenuse between major cities.
Anybody know why this concept isn’t talked about more?
It doesn't work like that- the geometric design of high speed rail and interstate highways are significantly different. The same is true for heavy rail vs high speed rail. You need much larger curves, and much smaller gradients for high speed rail.
Also clear space requirements for interstates would likely be infringed, which is one of the biggest factors of safety.
A more workable approach would be to reclaim abandoned rail ROW, and purchased additionally required ROW to extend curve length, where required. However much of this ROW has already been reclaimed by landowners and built upon.
Sadly, China has already wasted too much money on the so called high speed rails running at 300-350km per hour.
I was looking at my HSR options from Shanghai to Xi'an (1,500km distance) yesterday, the fastest train takes almost 6 hours and there is only one everyday. That 6 hours ride costs me almost $100 USD while $120 USD can covers my flight to Xi'an in 2.5 hours and I can choose the time of my flight. $20 extra to save 3.5 hours - the maths here is not hard.
I don't think any traffic network is ever wasted, as traffic seems to perpetual grow, especially in countries with a strongly growing economy. A long-distance maglev wouldn't make the HSR redundant. Having two train systems increases the total transport capacity and the HSR would be more for shorter and medium distances while the maglev could limit to long distance connections. Any cities in between would connect via HSR to the maglev.
Domestic flights in China are often delayed due to weather or congestion in route because the People's Liberation Army Air Force control the airspace too tightly. Shanghai-Beijing HSR takes longer than air flight but in certain times of year, when delays are common, HSR can be competitive, plus you are online the entire time.
This sort of stuff is impossible in a modern democracy where citizens and opposing interests have too much power to shoot down, infinitely delay or indefinitely increase costs of major infrastructure activities by litigation/protests/lobbying, etc.
Modern democracies simply cannot do large-scale infrastructure.
The benefits of projects like this always seem to quote how massive distances can be covered in a few hours. In this case it’s a 2200km journey being done in 2 hours.
That is of course amazing, but doesn’t seem very impactful to boring people like me. I’d be much more excited about my 30 mile train journey being over in 5 minutes instead of 45.
Even that seems selfish. Wouldn’t it be more exciting to have trains that carried 10x as many passengers, reducing fares by massive amounts?
The current HSR from Wuhan to HK is USD $96/$154/$298 for 2nd/1st/business class seats respectively. It’s all price regulated, so that’s the cost for every train on that route, every day.
Hasn't the last 50 years of attempting these shown that they're uneconomic in the extreme, and probably will continue to be even if China puts its admittedly heavily state-subsidized rail-building prowess behind it?
The Shanghai Airport Maglev was built by a German company trying to prove the concept for longer distance maglev construction. It was a failure; it was way too expensive and not meaningfully faster than conventional high speed rail.
Its also a money pit. They keep it running as a matter of nationalistic pride, not because its economical. Most folks in the area take the ordinary metro to the airport, not the maglev.
It doesn’t really go to the city, but some far out suburb in pudong. Faster to take a cab than subway + maglev transfer. Unless you specifically want to ride the maglev.
This doesn’t particularly matter to China. The cost of current HSR tickets isn’t even a free market. It’s all price-regulated so that every ticket for the same journey at the same class costs the same (Not pricing tiers like airlines). They’ll probably just eat the cost at the state-subsidised level in my mind.
Meanwhile in America we have a world class freight system between America, Canada, and Mexico that’s unrivaled anywhere else in the world. Europe uses trucking which is less environmentally friendly[1] than rail. The United States also runs the largest rail system in the world[2] vs any country (and the combined EU[3]).
Europe is leading the world in electrification and they are likely getting that power from greener energies. The US’s diesel-electrics are nasty but hopefully they will become fully electric in the long term or offset in the short term by improving passenger car pollution and building more renewable energy sources.
China’s energy sources are very nasty pollution wise and impact the environment in bad ways (hydro power, Three Gorges dam).[4]
Anyone know the pollution difference from using coal to power a train or using an ICE train?
I’m all for passenger trains and would love high speed rail but I also enjoy a healthy debate with some sources.
Word. I once stood on a bridge counting the cargo cars in a train passing beneath us, and gave up at 88 or so because I was pointlessly delaying a friend ...
They don't look like much, but they work like that quip: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes".
That is not the case at all[1]. I appreciate the thought out post and tone /sarcasm.
For further reading.[2]
> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)
So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline.
This is a horrible attitude to have. You're telling them that rather than push their country to be the best it can be, they should accept it for what it is and move if they don't like it? That's not what America is about my friend.
China, due to the nature of the country, has options at it's disposal that the US does not. Norway, the socialist paradise (where I live) , also does not have high speed rail BTW.
Yet "socialist" leaning countries like Spain, Germany, France, and Sweden do have high speed rail.
Sure, China's cheaper labor makes it easier for them to build out HSR quickly and affordably, but your implication that you need to be an authoritarian country for HSR to be feasible isn't accurate.
The lack of HSR in the US is due to several reasons. High construction costs, the fact that many cities are very spread out and cheaply served by domestic flights, and my earlier comment about NIMBYs blocking construction because they don't want it running through their farms.
I'm not a fan of regimes that concentrate religious minorities in camps, enforce an ideological form of social engineering through "social credit", harvest organs on an industrial scale, or disappear people for having views out of step with dear leader Winnie the Pooh. Rather, I feel a profound sense of disappointment at the sight of an America that used to move mountains and earth to improve the human condition, and, at a time of historically unprecedented aggregate wealth, productivity, and technological advancement, finds itself unable or unwilling to commit itself to the sorts of enterprises that less fortunate nations have no problem undertaking.
This is partially because the improvements you mention come from the private sector while the things that you miss usually done by government (at the very least the framework). US has a long history of crony capitalism or corporatism and as a result no real general public health care, public transportation and so on. It also does not help that different states have different regulations in many cases.
Why not debate the article, there are many anti-China articles on the first page too, like in this case is very interesting to see what the technical issues are and how can be work around them.
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I'm not talking about the dictionary definition, I talk about what the HN rule means and how moderators enforce it. If you need to dictionary-lawyer your rule violations it seldom does you good.
Well, how do you know what the rules mean? You have no direct access to dang's head. All one can rely on is the explicit words written, and the meanings of those words as defined by the dictionary.
Three posts about a large country constitutes a "shill account"? How does one even define "shill account"? Does the same standard apply to posts about USA or companies?
That is going to be the last day I use HN. I think this comment above just shows the intolerance of some people here who are yelling for moderation and unwilling to debate anything that is slightly against their worldview.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Seems like an extremely expensive vanity project. Is that wise for a middle income country where hundreds of millions of people live in abject poverty?
A train at M0.8 near ground level? The very first derailing/crash/etc will demonstrate quite well why this is a poor idea. Planes are quite far from anything easily damageable when they go this fast.
I never understood this argument. The same vulnerability exists with regular high speed rail. In fact... Since it’s protected by a thick steel tube, it’s harder to do that than with a regular Maglev. Leaks take much longer to depressurize a vacuum than you might think and would help slow the vehicle down.
The US is the world's largest economy and should be the shining example of amazing infrastructure, high-tech, green cities, and forward thinking policies. California is an especially egregious example in terms of infrastructure investment:
If California was a country it would be the world's fifth largest economy. It has a number of large and successful cities and areas connected along the coastline. San Diego, Orange County, LA, San Francisco. Why on earth isn't there a high speed rail between these cities? Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins? LA to San Fran in an hour and a half?
I took the train once from Irvine to Los Angeles and felt I had gone back in time to 1980. This in one of the richest counties in the world (OC). It's unthinkable in the year 2019, that we are all stuck on roads like I5 and 405, stuck in traffic for hours trying to make it to LA and the alternative is an ancient train trundling along at 50mph.
I hate the fact that an autocratic and repulsive Government is showing up the US in terms of green tech investment and high tech public transport systems, while the US govt is dropping taxes for the biggest companies and lowering spending on infrastructure and public works. This is guaranteed to have a terrible knock on effect over the next 20 years while the US is stuck with an old fashioned and clogged up transit system, polluted cities, and a dependence on fossil fuels.