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.
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.