I made an interactive art installation on this question once: A black box with a knob where you could adjust how much time you have, then it would offer you (Google streetview) panoramas of the locations it found within your distance, and in the end even print a paper slip with your travel itinerary to take with you.
The installation used realtime data (Google directions API): I somehow figured out, that if I would run this from a local machine and reset the browser frequently, Google would let me do this even without an API key… they certainly sensed something was awry and I did get API warnings and captchas because of 'suspicious traffic on my network', but they were nice enough not to block me completely. I strongly doubt this would still work though, this was in 2017.
I have been wishing Apple or Google maps would add this as a feature for at least five years now. When I’m in a new city for work, and I know I have 90 minutes til my next meeting, it would be massively helpful to see every lunch place in a 15-25 minute walking radius. The fact that there’s still not a “search/filter by transit time” feature in any Maps app seems like proof there’s not enough competition in that space in 2022.
I'm shocked how many apps rely on the google maps widget. It's expensive and mediocre, and ridiculously flaky on my phone.
The web touch UI is laughable, but at least the average third party occluding widget size keeps growing on mobile web pages -- I wouldn't want more than 10% of my phablet screen to be wasted displaying the map I just pulled up, after all!
I started a similar project a few years ago and the real problem for any new player is just data availability. I was able to get Open Street Map data, but I also needed data on businesses with ratings and photos. IMO this creates a huge moat against anyone entering the market.
I made this app a bunch of years ago where I sourced events starting in the next 0-3 hours nearby. Unfortunately not enough people had this problem. Still found it useful.
Have you tried a "restaurants near X" query? In my experience it's smart enough to calibrate "near" to your surroundings (walking distance in cities, driving distance in suburbia).
Before I had a car, or at times when I don't feel like driving, one of the problems I have is friends who always want to find a place to meet that is "between" us or "near me" where they use an Euclidian metric rather than a public transit time metric.
Very often "within a 10 minute walk of ANY train station" is preferable to "halfway between us", even if the train ride is 1 hour, because I can actually work (or catch up on sleep) on a train. Especially if that "halfway between us" is somewhere without transit which means I need to drive the whole way there.
Very cool. Slightly reminds me of an app I made for fun a few years ago that created a visual diary of your location history over the past 48 hours by pairing it with Google Streetview imagery.
I ran a home search startup in 2015 and I will always remember the moment my searching finally came up with the name "isochrone" and the explosion of research and data that came with that. Our home search went from "we'll send you an email when its done" to adding fake loading bars to make it seem like it was doing more.
I agree, Zillow has lackluster filtering. I’ve been working on something similar for people looking for remote work and aren’t particular about where they live. How did the project end up? What were the good parts and the bad parts?
GeoApify[0] is one of these commercial services using OpenStreetMap data. They have a no-friction isochrone "playground"[1] that's sufficient for casual exploration. You can switch the travel mode to "transit" to include train routes, but the maximum travel time for the demo is capped at one hour.
The results are very different, eg chronotrains-eu.vercel.app claims that Wittenberge is within an hour of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, but GeoApify won't take you further than Nauen. Possibly chronotrains-eu is showing a best-case travel time while GeoApify is attempting to calculate realtime travel using the current day's schedules?
I doubt the main OSM site would ever host an isochrone demo, as it's more of a reference implementation of very basic map and routing features that OSM data enables. Notably, the routing demos there do not (yet) include any kind of transit mode.
You can really see the Paris-centric approach in France: From Paris you can reach almost any other major city in 4h, but on the other hand, all the other metropolis can barely reach 1/4th of the other major population center in 4h.
Compare this to Germany where almost any major metropolis can reach 80% of the country in 4h ...
Infamously similar in the UK, even despite being smaller. Particularly East-West travel anywhere much North of London. Many inter-city routes are via London.
You don't need to go that much North - I used to live in Oxfordshire, trying to get to Cambridge for work was a joke (I don't drive). It would take 3.5h+ for a 140km journey from Oxford to Cambridge because train journeys were only through London (+ a railway station change), and there was only one coach that stopped in every town along the way (and which has been axed into two separate legs since the pandemic, making it 4h+ now).
In the end I moved to London, so that's manageable now...
I didn't mean much North! Heh, another of those BrE words like 'quite'.
Oxford/Cambridge is a classic example, yes. (For those unfamiliar, they're like two spokes right next to each other on quite a small rim where London is the hub. But large enough (or close enough spokes) that 'in and back out' seems silly.)
At an average speed that makes a horse blush, and a capacity that is barely more than a Vauxhall corsa.
Cross country routes are local trains masquerading as long distance, thus with ridiculous prices and the requirement to do split tickets. There’s nowhere near enough capacity on the line.
Penzance to Exeter takes 3 hours - half the speed of a drive. From Exeter to Birmingham it’s another 2h30 at just 60mph average.
You’d be hard pushed to drive Penzance to Exeter in 1hr30, more like 2 hours really. And whilst the train is slow the journey is lovely along the Exe estuary and then along the coast. Having said that it is a bit silly that when going from London to Penzance most of the time is spent on the final third of the journey past Exeter.
The South West is er not at all 'North of London' though, last I was there (where I was 'born and raised').
We also don't really have any of the major cities I meant in that context, Bristol I suppose. How do you get from Bournemouth to Bristol for example - via Dorchester with a station change? How about Southampton to Exeter - via Bristol? It's by no means the worst region, and I claimed the opposite, but it still suffers in the same way (albeit on a smaller scale) really, NW-SE rather than W-E in the North, in both cases its opposing the 'spokes' into London.
Because Metropolitan France (note the capitalization) is how the European portion of France is referred to: compare with Overseas France, which includes territories in South America and Oceania, to be non-exhaustive.
This is a difference in attitude between Americans and French when describing their countries: the French tend to regard overseas territories as more vitally part of their country than Americans do. Not sure why, possibly it was a deliberately-cultivated attitude by the government at some point, or maybe the difference arose organically. Meanwhile I think a lot of Americans kinda-unconsiously barely even consider Hawaii and Alaska really parts of America, let alone the numerous non-state territories.
Actually, now that I think about it, the sense of "Metropolitan France" is very similar to the term "the continental United States"
American here, I’d disagree about Hawaii and Alaska but agree about the non-state territories. The non-state territories being unable to vote and not having representation in the legislature means that they don’t get as much attention in national politics, so they’re less top of mind. (Yes, both of those situations suck and I wish we would change them.)
The restrictions are tied to geography not persons.
A Puerto Rican in California is entitled to all the benefits of US Citizenship whereas a Californian in Puerto Rico is not. Mostly these are related to welfare and elections. This would be the case for the Californian or Puerto Rican living anywhere in the world outside the US.
You retain voting rights of the last jurisdiction you lived in within the US (states or territories) after moving abroad.
So a Californian that moves to, say, Germany can still vote by mail as though they were in California.
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You're mostly correct about the loss of welfare benefits, though. The only exception being that you do remain eligible for Social Security retirement, although some people may not consider that "welfare".
It's remarkable that you said all of this, I'll be generous and say that someone else completely made up the part about the Jones Act and you just heard them and repeated it.
So a regular (ie mainland) US citizen has to file taxes (& pay if earnings 108k+) of living anywhere in world. Does this stay true if same citizen lives in these territories you refered?
> This is a difference in attitude between Americans and French when describing their countries
I'm not sure that's true - it appears to involve a legal distinction. I see many references to Algeria having been an "integral part of France" where other French territory wasn't. But I don't actually know what the terminology means. Anyway, I'd begin by looking to the legal status France tended to give to overseas territories, rather than the attitudes of the French, to explain this.
> Meanwhile I think a lot of Americans kinda-unconsiously barely even consider Hawaii and Alaska really parts of America, let alone the numerous non-state territories.
And this is a perfect case in point; Americans do consider Hawaii and Alaska to be really parts of America, because they have the legal status.
What there is, is a blindspot about territories. Just look at the flag: that there are parts of the United States which aren't States kinda doesn't compute.
The asymmetry from my home town of Bordeaux in the South West is striking, towards the North I can reach Brussels, 763 Km away, but going South I can barely enter Spain which is only about 200 Km away!
> Since the beginning of the 1990s new high-speed passenger lines in Spain have been built to the international standard gauge of 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in), to allow these lines to link to the European high-speed network.
(...)
> In general the interface between the two gauges in Spain is dealt with by means of gauge-changing installations, which can adjust the gauge of appropriately designed wheelsets on the move.
I believe I’ve read this was also due to Iberian gauge high speed rail technology not really being existent at the time Spain started building HSR in a hurry for Expo ‘92? in Sevilla, and they’ve continued using standard gauge for it (to the benefit of the link with France).
However the huge investment in HSR (longest network after China, but low utilization), has also come at the cost of the local and regional train network (which still use broad gauge, yes there are gauge changing trains, but the broad gauge network is languishing).
The Talgo train with adjustable track gauges has been connecting france/spain for quite a while, but it is by no means designed for long-distance, high-speed travel so Spain kind of had to resort to switching to standard gauge which is also what other important neighbouring countries and possible destinations use (France, Germany, parts of Switzerland , Benelux, Italy).
I doubt it has to do with the EU institutions but rather the convenient location at the rhine valley. The section of the rhine valley between Mannheim (Germany) and Basel (Switzerland) is one of the busiest train routes in Europe for freight and passengers.
It also shows how much the train networks focus on domestic travel.
In nearly all bigger countries it is possible to reach most bigger cities within the 5h.
But journeys in this time-frame seldomly go much beyond the border.
There is still much optimization potential for transnational travel in Europe's train network.
For a short summary, the basic problem is that rail infrastructure is paid for by national funds, so there is a bigger incentive to connect two places within the same country than to connect one place within the country to another place within a neighboring country.
Wendover theorizes that the decoupling of rail networks from rail service operators (as pushed by the EU-level government) can lead to new demand for international routes as budget operators spring up that are less tied to the demands of a particular national government.
There are a lot of plans for international train lines in Europe and some of them are actually being built. If you check the Wikipedia page of the the Spanish rail service[1], you'll see that new connections to France should be completed sometime around 2023. Currently the only high speed link to France is from Barcelona, which makes traveling from Madrid and Spain's Northern coast to Paris more time consuming.
There's also a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel plan, which is more like in an exploration/planning phase, but that should connect those cities and make them function almost like one. Instead of a two hour ferry ride it would be more like a 30min train ride. Øresund Bridge basically did that to Copenhagen and Malmö.
Seems like those connections will all use the existing (standard gauge) Perpignan/Figueres route through the Perthus Tunnel in the Pyrenees. Your source mentions only one new cross-border connection but will essentially terminate shortly after the french border, with no connection to the french highspeed network. So I suspect connections to Paris from anywhere in Spain will go through Barcelona for the forseeable future.
Yes, funding is one thing. Other thing is that history of control systems and regulations is wild. For each border crossing you need different pantographs (some locomotives have four different pantographs for different countries), the engineer has to be able to identify different signalling systems, the train needs different computer systems for interpreting different control systems ...
There are initiatives like ETCS which partially improve the control situation, but even that has lots of national variations and takes ages to rollout.
Historic systems with little funding (relative to need) are fun.
> certification for international operation is not seen as a priority, as the trains are restricted to domestic services for an initial 10 years under the terms of a grant from the EU Cohesion Fund which covered 22% of the project cost.[31]
> Wendover theorizes that the decoupling of rail networks from rail service operators (as pushed by the EU-level government) can lead to new demand for international routes as budget operators spring up that are less tied to the demands of a particular national government.
Some problems with that approach are
1. It doesn't take that many different operators before you start running into capacity limits of the network and get into a situation where additional services (when you want even more competition) cannot be scheduled without actively worsening the services offered by existing operators (including operators that might not even be competing within the same market segment, i.e. like long distance operators vs. regional and commuter service operators or freight operators).
2. In principle connections are a core part of railways' service offerings (especially in countries that aren't as centralised as e.g. the stereotype of France), but attractive connection times are only possible between a very limited number of trains, so with multiple competing long distance operators who gets to decide which operator gets the path with the attractive connection times and who doesn't? Attractive connections also require through-ticketing in terms of passenger rights, so you won't be left stranded if you miss a connection because of preceding delays, and both scheduled/coordinated connections and through-ticketing run counter to the mantra of absolutely free-for-all competition.
3. For the wheel-rail interface to work well, you definitively need to take a holistic approach between the needs of the infrastructure and the needs of the vehicles running on that infrastructure. Introducing a hard legal split between infrastructure owner and train operating companies in the name of free competition unfortunately tends to turn that interface into a legal and bureaucratic quagmire that is anything but efficient for the railway system as a whole.
For example in Germany construction works (outside of emergency repairs) are required to be scheduled several years (not just a year plus a bit so its known in time for the next timetable, but some years more) in advance. At that point you already need to specify the exact and precise length of any required possessions, but at the same time due to the rules for tendering construction works, you're also not supposed to specify the exact method of doing those construction works, so for anything slightly more complex how are you now supposed to calculate the exact length for the required possessions if you aren't actually allowed to specify how the construction works are to be executed?
Or for another example: Within the wheel-rail interface you cannot avoid a certain amount of wear and tear, especially on more curvy stretches of line. This affects both the train operators (wheels) as well as the infrastructure operator (rails). Ideally you'd work out some compromise that is tenable for both sides of the interface, and normally somewhat more wear and tear on the wheels is to be preferred, because wheels can re-profiled and/or changed in fixed, covered maintenance facilities (i.e. better working conditions) and while the trains are potentially out of service for regular maintenance anyway, whereas rail renewals need to potentially brave the elements and either block rail traffic or else need to be conducted at unattractive times (for workers, i.e. on weekends and especially at night).
The legal separation between train operating companies and infrastructure owners nevertheless has led train operating companies to possibly try optimising the wheel-rail interface for their own benefit, which has meant that on some heavily used routes with tight(ish) curves, due to excessive wear rails now have to be renewed every year or two, which longer term absolutely isn't sustainable in terms of the demands placed on the maintenance personnel of the infrastructure operator (and never mind the costs, too). (Normally, rail life before a complete renewal is measured in decades!)
So now "the empire strikes back" and the infrastructure operator installs hardened rails in order to return to a somewhat more manageable and sustainable maintenance schedule, but because the vehicle operators haven't been prepared for that switch, they now suddenly find themselves with excessive wheel wear (and unfortunately at a point in time when due to outside political events there isn't much excess capacity in the market for railway wheels). In the end, it's ultimately the passenger who suffers here.
I will admit to having only read the first point of the long post, so I'll just respond to that:
> It doesn't take that many different operators before you start running into capacity limits of the network
Don't get this. If there is that much demand, then clearly it makes sense to build out the system? More rails, higher speed, and/or better bypasses for trains that need to stop at each station for example.
It's usually a hard question to predict where public or investment money is best spent, but this situation seems like it would be quite clear.
Unfortunately these days building out capacity is usually neither cheap nor fast, so it's not uncommon to get stuck in some sort of intermediate twilight zone where you have somewhat too many trains for too little tracks, but not so many that building out additional infrastructure is clearly warranted (and even when it is warranted, planning and construction will unfortunately nowadays take years to decades, and what do you do until then?).
Open access operators also often start running only a few trains per day – building additional expensive infrastructure for just a few trains per day might not be worth it, but conversely a few trains per day are potentially already more than enough to upset an exiting regular interval timetable and timed connections.
It also shows an effect that the focus on high speed rail brings: rural areas are often very badly connected. Here in France they've even kept shutting down regional lines. That creates the train equivalent of "fly-over states": areas that you see from the train while going through, but that it would be impractical to go to.
Has anyone considered the following? In a small town, you have a section of track running parallel to high speed rail. The track has a small and short "local" train (maybe just a couple of cars) that picks up passengers and accelerates to maybe 80 MPH, while the high-speed train slows to the same speed. The trains run next to each other for a couple of miles, some doors open between them, and people can step between the "local" train and the "long distance" train.
This lets the high-speed train serve a lot more places without losing much speed. Maybe the local train serves several towns in the area.
It was also planned for cargo (e.g. at the Megahub Lehrte) but didn't really pan out there either, even though ISO containers are much more predictable in their self-propelled movement than humans. At least all the material from that site now shows much automation, but it all happens at rest.
The problem is it's doable but if you do it, you might as well have a slow, regional railroad that goes between the stops of the fast international railroad. So a local/express situation, which is much simpler technology-wise.
My google fu is failing me but here are a few of the problems.
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Reliability
For a connection like this to work the trains have to meet, consistently, every hour or however frequently they run. This is pretty difficult, most rail networks are highly complex and delays cascade across a network. With station transfers this is okay, you can drop off anyone who needs to transfer to wait and let everyone else continue, but in this sort of moving transfer either people just totally miss their connection because it wasn't there, or the train loops around somehow and delays everyone else continuing on.
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Practicality
Let's say trains meet at 80 mph. Assuming you give people one minute to get their bags, walk to the door, take their seats in the other train (fairly aggressive for anyone who isn't a fit young adult) that means you spend 1.3 miles of distance traveling. That means 1.3 miles of parallel track where neither train can actually stop to serve local communities.
Station transfers in comparison are fairly compact (the length of a train) and they can actually also let people on and off from the surrounding areas with appropriate exits, whereas that's not possible with moving trains.
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Safety
We can't really guarantee two trains will move at the same speed parallel to each other. Trains are not automated to such a degree outside of self-contained metro networks, full automation is too complex to do in one shot and partial automation is still very complex and in its early days. Also whatever physical mechanism has to be tight enough to accommodate accessibility (wheelchairs can't go over large gaps) and reliable enough to work all the time; what happens if said mechanism breaks down while the trains are moving and conjoined?
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Finally there's the matter of actual need. If you need trains to not get slowed down, you can have some express services skip connecting to local regional services at all. It turns out demand for that kind of service is fairly limited; as an example, Amtrak has tried several times to introduce nonstop DC to NYC service, but it turns out that the additional passengers do not offset the loss of passengers from Baltimore, Wilmington and Philadelphia.
I've mused about a similar idea for California's high speed rail, which, should it ever be built, would be rendered impractically slow by frequent stops.
The idea is to drop cars without slowing down. These cars would have brakes, that's it. Before the station, drop the car, it slows enough to give safe time for switching, and cruises to a halt at the local station.
That's drop off, pickup is the slow train, which runs twice a day in each direction and assembles the carriage on the way.
Impractical for various reasons, sure. But what if.
The plan for California high speed rail was to replace plane flights and long distance car travel, not to have frequent stops (at least 40 miles/65 km between stops, sometimes longer). Only the major cities.
Yes, that was the plan. The raison d'être, even. But if it ever gets built, it will be obliged for political reasons to stop so often as to make it an unattractive alternative to flying from SF to LA or vice versa.
I could swear I've seen illustrations of such concepts. In the same theme as circular runways and having runways balanced across the tops of city skyscrapers.
Except "flyover" states are not just rural areas. There are tons of big cities in non-coastal areas of the US. I don't think people who use the term are maliciously doing it, but it does diminish the lives of millions of people as unimportant and inconsequential compared to the "important" areas on the coasts
> Except "flyover" states are not just rural areas
Not just, no. But, looking at population density by states, you've got roughly:
(1) the coastal states way at the top (except Alaska, Oregon, and Maine),
(2) non-coastal Mississippi River states, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona, and Vermont in the middle
(3) Everything else.
They are very different environments for things like passenger transport economics.
> There are tons of big cities in non-coastal areas of the US.
Define “big city”? There are three (out of 24 in the US) metropolitan areas with a population over 2.5 million where the principal city is located in a state without ocean, Gulf of Mexico, or Great Lakes coast; 0 out of 9 of your cutoff is 5 million.
Well, yes. New Yorkers and Californians see the rest of the country as useless, and most don't bother to learn that entire cities exist outside of their coastal regions.
It's also part of the current hyperpoliticalization we're seeing.
This is the strong argument against high speed rail in the USA.
We don't even have anything close to regional rail, and highspeed rail would consume all public capital that would be used to improve regional rail systems.
Existing freight rails are so bad that passenger rail should get its own pairs of tracks in many cases (both to be higher speed and to serve the places people actually live, work and shop), and if you’re going to the expense of building new you may as well build it to support higher speeds.
Commuter rail expansion and operations is the primary capital consumption area now, and there are more than a few such local / regional rail systems that could use several billion dollars each, on a continuing basis, for equipment, roadbed and station expansion.
Language barriers in Europe are still rather formidable.
Plus, when it comes to daily "Pendlers" (people who cross the border regularly to work), often they cross the border in places where there is no extant railway connection. In Czechia, a lot of commuting people cross the German border using the D5/A6 highway, which has no nearby alternative. The closest potentially upgradeable railway is 40 km away in difficult mountain terrain, so even if it got upgraded to a reasonable standard, it would have to attract different customers going from different A to different B.
By far the most common demographics to cross the borders in trains in my country are tourists, who like to go from one capital or important city (Berlin, Krakow) to another (Prague, Vienna).
The thing is that this used to be better. Groningen (north of the Netherlands) used to connect to Germany. I think there are new plans to restart that. Lots of international night trains also were abolished a decade ago.
I wonder how much privatization has played a role in this.
Fascinating how clearly you can see this with the 5hr limit from Dusseldorf being pretty much exactly the French border from the Atlantic to Switzerland
For the Europeans on HN: on the East coast of the US, the furthest you can get by train in ~5h is roughly Boston to NYC, or NYC to Washington, DC. Both are roughly equidistant (~220 miles, ~354 kilometers).
One of the perverse things with our passenger rail network is that you can actually take take trains that "only" take 2.5 hours, but: they run nonstop point-to-point, and any subsequent connection you make (e.g. to Richmond, a major city in Virginia) will be on a diesel train that shares trackage with CSX or another major freight line. The end result is that traveling the extra ~90 miles from Washington, DC to Richmond generally takes over 3 hours, when it should really take less than an hour.
Boston to Philadelphia a closer approximation. The Acela is scheduled for 5h 1m for that trip. I travel between Boston and New York by train frequently, and even the slower regional service takes < 4 hours. Either way, still not a great comparison to Europe.
Sorry, this was confusing wording on my part -- I was trying to say that Boston/NY or NY/DC is consistently under 5 hours, and that just about everything else is over 5 hours, illustrating a gap in our network.
NYC to DC is also consistently around 3.5 hours, even with the slower NE Regional.
With a modern high-speed rail line, you'd theoretically be able to get from NYC to Chicago in around 4:15, even when accounting for stops along the way.
That's an average of 300 km/h. There are already lines in service elsewhere the world that are that fast.
The fastest service was Wuhan–Guangzhou, which averaged 313 km/h on non-stops, but is not run any more.
Chicago-NYC with stops would probably be 5 hours, which is barely competitive with flying. The intermediate stops would potentially make it viable though.
I would take a 5-hour train from NYC to Chicago over flying, because of the extra comfort and because getting to/from the airport on either end is a hassle.
However, modern high-speed rail lines are capable of 350 km/h top speeds, and there are lines that average 300 km/h, with stops included (e.g., Beijing-Nanjing).
5 hours, from New York Penn station to Chicago Union Station (as opposed to killing an hour to JFK/LGA/EWR and another hour from O'Hare), without having to be an hour early on top of that so the TSA can fondle you, sitting in a normal sized chair, allowed to stand up whenever you want, and complimentary wifi the whole time. Yeah, that's competitive with flying.
You can also go Beijing to Shanghai in 4.5 hours. That's over 1200km or 750mi averaging above 260km/hr.
I think it's the fastest long distance passenger service available and has the benefit of being central Shanghai to south-central Beijing (rather than north-east where PEK airport is). That made it noticeably better than business air travel between the two cities.
You could also ride the Pudong maglev (at 430km/hr peak and 250km/hr average), but it was never extended from PVG to Jing An and the main Shanghai station.
However, now you have to go through security at each end which adds at least 1.5hr, and that's ignoring pandemic restrictions.
Beijing to Hongkong is about 2,450km and takes 9h by high speed train, which is more than 270km/h average as there are a few stops along the way. I believe that the advertised speed is about 350km/h.
Hmm, I don't think one needs 1.5hr to pass the pre-COVID China Railway security check. 5 min is the norm I experienced.
Honestly, I doubt such security checks can deter determined terrorists.
Five hours, I assume, is the maximum amount of time an average person can enjoy sitting in a train. With overnight trains making a comeback, there are much more possibilities. I recently enjoyed falling asleep in Central Europe and waking up over the Alps near the sea. Trains are amazing.
To be fair, you also get about three to four times the distance per minute out of it (850km/h pretty much the whole way as the crow flies vs 250 average if you're lucky plus curves).
To be clear, I find it absurd that airplane companies are still allowed to sell tickets without pricing in externalities for trips with good and high-speed train connections like Paris–Madrid. However, for actually going somewhere far away there just isn't really another choice but to take that plane. Your only other choice is to never go there at all, or take out weeks of travel for a ship or something. It's still too cheap, at least those that go regularly can also afford for Climeworks to undo their environmental pollution, so I hate to be defending air travel here, but 10h flights are a different ball game than 10h train rides.
The Paris-Madrid connection is not really good though, as you have to go all the way to the east of Spain and pass through Barcelona before heading west towards Madrid.
Luckily, there are some lines under construction that will connect Spain to France through Irún, and which should make things much better.
Little usability nitpick: it is really hard for me to see the connection Paris - London (less than 2.5 hours in real life thx to Eurostar). You need to very precisely mouse over Gare du Nord, which is hard, since it seems hidden by the other train station and airport nearby.
Not sure if at a certain scale, one should see all the conenctions form all the train stations in Paris?
> This map shows you how far you can travel from each station in Europe in less than 5 hours.
Aww, seems like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia aren't a part of Europe, then.
But jokes aside, the visualization itself is pretty cool, though it might also be really useful to be able to put emphasis on the actual train tracks, especially in the further zoom levels, though map implementations don't always allow this to be done easily, without too much customization or running your own tile server.
Nice. It doesn't seem to play very nice with cities that have multiple stations. If you hover Paris, Gare de Lyon gets selected most of the time. But if you zoom in, you can select other Paris stations (e.g. Gare de L'Est) which leads to different results
When people talk about how bad trains are in Germany and how good (relatively speaking) they are in Spain, well, one word: connectivity. Hover over any city in Germany and you'll see almost no gaps in the map. Hover over any northern city in Spain and you'll see no direct connection by train among them (!).
Sweden-Norway is getting improved, the railroad between åre-trondheim has been 2 separate trains due to the Norwegian train not being electrified. Which is now being worked on. Trains in the northern parts of Sweden will always be sparse due to the low population tho.
It's sad to see how disconnected the national railway systems are in eastern europe. Basically, 5h always fills the national borders but no further in Hungary, Romania, Poland etc
E.g., train connections from Czech Republic to southern Germany are missing all together.
> train connections from Czech Republic to southern Germany are missing all together.
This is a huge problem IMHO. You always have to use the route via Dresden/Prague - it was different in the past - Would be really great if there would be some Eurocity Nürnberg-Pilsen or Munich-Budweis.
While I agree that rail infrastructure should be improved significantly in Eastern Europe, if you look a bit closer you'll see that there are many other countries where the 5 hrs don't take you much outside of national borders, e.g. Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, most of Scandinavia etc.
It's also important to note that Ukraine and Moldova run on a different gauge, so the border crossing takes some time.
The U.K. has nonsense passport and security checks which mean trains only go from london and adds a 60-90 minute connection. Without those you could easily route Manchester, Bristol, Leeds, Birmingham etc via Stratford and the tunnel and into much of north west europe in 5 hours.
The Czech borders are fairly mountainous. If you start in Prague, there's a tentacle that just barely reaches Regensburg in Germany. It crosses the border in the gap between two mountain ranges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham-Furth_Depression
Building other routes would likely be possible, but only with a lot of tunneling.
We all have neglected the networks while claiming to have “the biggest rail network”. Well, now it’s the slowest, and probably the most underfunded.
The missing connection to South Germany don’t make sense though. Just take a train to Berlin and take DB anywhere.
> The missing connection to South Germany don’t make sense though. Just take a train to Berlin and take OBB anywhere.
It's the difference between 6-8h and 2-3h to reach a city in Czech Republic. However the tracks connecting Germany/Czech Republic in the south are not in good shape if I remember that correctly.
As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically empty, it would be pretty easy to build high-speed rail.
The USA has a world-class _Freight_ rail network, and almost all existing track in the country is owned by the freight operators, who manage the track to optimize it for freight operations. In many cases, they are openly hostile to passenger service on their tracks.
On top of this, most cities in the USA were built (or destroyed and rebuilt) for private cars being the primary mode of transportation. In Europe, one of the benefits of taking the train over an airplane is that the train stations will often be in a walkable city center with a good connection to public transit. In the USA, outside of a handful of older cities (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston . . .), the train station drops you off in the middle of nowhere, usually with far less connections and services than the airport has. When compared to air travel, intercity rail travel is often slower, less convenient, less frequent, and more expensive.
Even with the Acela/northwest corridor, flights are often cheaper than rail, so it is the convenience of the downtown stations and connections to public transit that drive people to take the train over airplanes. It's no coincidence that the major cities on the route (DC, Philiadelphia, NYC, Boston) are also cities with some of the best metro networks in the country.
No it doesn't have a world class freight rail network. The North American rail infra is incredibly primitive. Most of it is "dark territory" (no track sensors), unlike Europe. I used to write rail automation software for a German firm. They were appalled at the state of affairs here. One of the most lucrative rail systems in the US had an average speed of their trains in the single digits MPH!
I think the term "world class" is unfortunate with connection to freight rail networks.
Freight does not need to travel super fast or super high tech. What it needs is to be able to travel everywhere at high throughput and cheaply. US is doing quite well in that regard.
High throughput comes with a caveat, since it’s high throughput given the existing poor conditions.
The US used to have much more tracks, but the private railroads stripped a lot of them as far as they could get away with. There are lines that were four-tracked or were electrified that have now been reduced to unelectrified single track, so you now have a much more sluggish, polluting and congested railroad, and on top of that much is poorly maintained to save money.
—-
Also a lot of the freight is bulk freight like coal. This has led to some interesting dynamics where freight railroads oppose coal plant closures, because they will lose a major source of tonnage.
> Freight does not need to travel super fast or super high tech.
That depends on what you want to ship. In the US the train just gave up on many other class of freight. Yes, large scale slow bulk transport doesn't need speed, other things might.
Track sensors are especially useful in they middle of nowhere.
And there are plenty of latency sensitive applications for freight rail which are developed in other places. They don't make sense in the US because the capability isn't there, not because there's no market for it.
> They don't make sense in the US because the capability isn't there, not because there's no market for it.
There really isn't. Freight companies are responsible for maintaining investing in the rail, and if it doesn't make them money, they aren't going to put it there. Heck, a lot of places are single rail (meaning, no two way traffic at the same time), because it doesn't really make sense to dump more money into an extra set of tracks in those places.
Again, you're conflating things. There is a market for low latency rail freight. The rail companies find that it's better to keep the rail as is and invest the profits somewhere else. That doesn't mean that the market doesn't exist.
The correct approach is for low latency rail freight to operate on passenger rail systems which already have the necessary speeds and flexibilities. This is structurally unfeasible in the US but it's still definitely a market that better rail systems can service at no extra cost.
The freight companies own the railway, they optimize the rails for freight, which is why we move much more freight by train than Europe. Passenger service is something they do for the federal government subsidy and nothing more.
And actually, sharing tracks between passenger and freight service is something that they don't really do in Europe. Because they share tracks, American passenger trains have to build at a weight on part with freight trains. Most lines in Europe separate out passenger and freight service lines so they can run lighter trains for passenger service.
A big part of why the US moves more by rail is simply because it moves more goods overland than in Europe.
Low latency freight for smaller, high value items is often done on passenger lines (or even passenger trains) because it doesn't put any scheduling pressure on passenger service.
As far as use of freight in Europe, the elephant in the room is that the EU uses a lot more sea freight than the US. Indeed, while the modal split for EU trucking is around 50%, it's around 70% in the US, and it thus seems clear that the real reason that there is less rail shipping within Europe is because there is much more competition from maritime shipping.
This is a perfect example of path-dependent policy. Because the decision was to select for freight, other kinds of rail are "unfeasible". I'm using scare quotes to suggest that it's not really unfeasible, it's a choice.
And since trucking capacity has been maxed out in the US for quite a while (Amazon is the big mover for this situation, even before covid), you can bet this path dependence is biting us now.
I'm surprised by the general opposition to your comment. I agree. US transit infrastructure, including rail, is anything but world class. Sure, we move tons of freight, but is that the standard alone?
Just because it works doesn't mean it can't be improved better. It's always ok to reject the "don't fix it if it's not broken" mentality.
In the context of freight, it is the lone standard because as another commenter pointed out, throughput is more important than latency in bulk goods transport whereas latency is a much more important variable when passengers are involved.
US rail owners and operators know what the variables are that they care about and their customers care about are, and also what insurance companies care about and as a result, they are adept at moving goods coast to Great Lakes to coast, across the Appalachians, Missouri-Mississippi river system, the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades and the California Coastal Range.
If they’re not using some software package or have complete sensor coverage on their tracks, they probably judged that they don’t need it. If a competitor actually finds advantage with these things tomorrow, then they will all adopt it.
I think it’s easy to call something out as primitive but what changes could be made and how much impact would it have? It doesn’t seem like our freight trains are the bottleneck when moving goods around the country.
They kind of are if you consider how many goods are still shipped by trucks.
The US is perfect for rail - lots of long trips, with lots of goods. It could probably have more market share if goods could move more quickly and flexibly.
Just to add some numbers, the freight modal splits as of 2018 (most recent year with complete data), measured in tonne-kilometers, for a few countries [1] and the EU taken as a whole [2]:
US: 45% road, 38% rail, 17% other (water/pipeline)
Europe is not perfect for rail. Shorter trips, complicated geography, etc. etc. there are some legacy technology constraints that the us doesn’t have or solved a hundred years ago (loading gauge, max train length, couplers).
The fact is the us could do better, pointing to Europe which could also do better is moot.
I believe this as well. And I happen to know of one of the largest rail systems in North America changes its topology weekly. I'm not sure "throughput over latency" is as much of a mindset as those here who say it is.
Imo, your choice of scare quotes around "smart" telegraph your unwillingness to consider even a well-founded data informed argument, for what it's worth.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
GP asked for a well founded data-based argument, assuming they don't actually want that is in bad faith.
I agree with GP that the connection between sensors and high speed to better freight rail is tenuous, whereas large amounts of tonnage moved more clearly indicates good freight rail.
I’ve never seen a return Manchester to london flight for £40, yet I can walk up to picadilly, but a ticket, board the train tomorrow and be in london in about 3 hours.
The fact the US is basically empty means the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high because of the sheer distances involved. You’re talking like 1000 miles, not 200. The places which are closer together, like the East Coast, do have some passenger rail but they’re also much denser, like Europe, and so they have the same kind of constraints (or worse).
The US has a lot of freight rail, and we use it.
The Wild West mentality has gone away in the railroad industry which is now hyper-conservative and regulated.
I do sometimes wish the US lived up to the Wild West stereotype the Europeans imagine. But no, we often have just as much stifling regulation (if not more), depending on where you’re talking about. But we do have gun violence, so there’s that.
The center of population in the US is still just barely to the west of the Mississippi, whenever people point out how vast and largely empty the US is, the leave out that the population itself is actually generally fairly close together for a majority of the country.
You could easily have HSR all over the south, Midwest and NE, and then between population centers on the west coast, just likely not in the desert and western Great Plains.
See for example Alon Levy's map of proposed HSR for the Eastern United States: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/02/10/high-speed-rai... They've actually done serious investigation of what's viable given typical costs and ridership of high-speed lines elsewhere in the world.
The high-speed bits they propose are basically a Boston-Atlanta-Chicago triangle with some ornaments (Chicago - KC, Chicago - Minneapolis, Cleveland - Pittsburgh - Philadelphia, and connections to Toronto, Montreal, Quebec), and separate networks in Florida and Texas. Connecting the Florida and Texas networks to the main one is marginal.
I'm not sure of their opinions on separate networks in the Pacific Northwest and in California, but I'm sure they have looked at it. I do recall them saying that it doesn't make sense to connect, say, Portland to San Francisco - there's just not much in between.
It doesn’t make sense to connect Portland and SF, but there’s a lot of value to be gained in connecting Portland and Vancouver BC, and San Diego to SF/possibly Sacramento.
We would definitely want to have a “constellation” of networks rather than one interconnected system given the geography of the US, and that’s fine. There’s never going to be a time when it makes more sense to travel from LA to NYC by rail instead of flying.
The biggest takeaway is that there is a specific role that HSR can play, but it’s not going to take over all long distance trips. Given where we are starting in the US, however, there is a massive mine of untapped potential.
Right. You don't want a line down the entire West Coast, even though it's tempting to draw. But a line from Vancouver to Portland makes sense, as does a "greater California" system - roughly lines from Los Angeles to SF, Sacramento, Vegas, San Diego. The latter is basically the California HSR system that's under construction, plus the proposed privately built line from LA to Vegas. (Levy also proposes LA to Phoenix; Phoenix is further than Vegas but also bigger, so maybe it makes sense.)
Even in the east there are some gaps. It's obvious that a midwestern network centered on Chicago and a southeastern network centered on Atlanta make sense, but it's a bit more of a stretch to connect those to the northeast.
Why not? The great advantage of high speed rail is that with intermediate stops along the route you can service smaller cities which previously, or as you just did, would be considered flyover country. Thus making the value of the system greater than just the end terminuses.
Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist. Neither would themselves ever be valuable enough for HSR, but as part of a larger system they definitely would bring value.
Especially since you would get 3.5 hour trains Bay Area <-> Seattle and 4.5 hour trains to Vancouver.
That is right at the limit of when flying starts to make more sense from a time perspective.
Edit: Here's a good video on the concept. From a comment (by the author) he says that France and Spain has many lines in the range of 4 given his scoring. It just seems miniscule compared to the enormous potential of DC <-> Boston corridor.
"U.S. High Speed Rail: What's Next? Analyzing Extensions and Expansions, and What Makes Sense"
> Especially since you would get 3.5 hour trains Bay Area <-> Seattle and 4.5 hour trains to Vancouver.
Hiroshima to Tokyo is just over 3.5 hours on the Shinkansen, and it’s a 500 mile trip. SF TO Seattle is roughly 800 miles… You’re making a very optimistic projection.
> Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist.
You’re barely cracking 500k people and covering the most difficult terrain on the entire corridor.
The problem is that TSA isn't as bad as it was right after 9/11, and baggage tracking is much better on all airlines. You no longer need to arrive 2 hours before the scheduled departure and spend an hour collecting your bags.
With TSA PreCheck, I can reliably go from curb to gate in less than 15 minutes. If you're not someone who feels the need to be the first one on the plane, that means you can arrive at the airport 30 minutes before the scheduled departure time.
So, as a practical matter, that means a SJC->SEA flight is at least an hour shorter than the hypothetical train.
I'm also very skeptical that a train could reach Seattle in 3.5 hours from the Bay Area. That would require an average speed of over 200 mph on the great-circle path.
California High-Speed Rail only promises an average speed of 150 mph between LA and San Francisco (w/ a world-class top speed of 220 mph). Additionally, geography dictates a more circuitous route. CAHSR route-miles between LA and the SFBA (similar terrain) are 25% greater than the straight-line distance.
Realistically, the train would take almost 6 hours, and a plane would be less than half.
Yeah, I haven't flown for a while and I gather there's still a certain level of travel chaos. But pre-pandemic, I'd get to the airport early because it's more relaxing for me and my limo company doesn't like to cut things close. But with TSA Pre, I was rarely more than 15 minutes through security and often much faster. Backups happen and I'd rather build in slack for them. But in my experience, at the US airports I fly through, the "security theater" is rarely onerous.
South of Eugene and north of Redding, the land is mountainous and would be extremely difficult to build a straight enough line to serve as HSR. The existing Amtrak Cascades service goes between Eugene and Vancouver BC.
I agree, a high speed line between Eugene and Redding seems like an overkill. However a traditional electrified railway with a stop in Medford would be pretty sweat.
With the planned California High Speed rail going between Sacramento and Los Angeles, and the proposed Cascadia high speed rail going all the way to Eugene, this traditional link would enable a sleeper train between Seattle and Los Angeles in something like 10-13 hours. That is way better then today’s Coastal Starlight which makes the trip in 36 hours.
There really isn't much between Portland area and San Francisco area, and there isn't enough potential economic activity that an HSR would induce (it is too mountainous, which also means building HSR would be more expensive).
Because not enough people live along the way. Sure you an build track and run trains, but 5 hours on a train is about the time where flying is enough faster that people will fly instead of taking the train. Less than 5 hours train competes well (stations are closer to you, and no long security lines), but after that airplanes are enough faster that few people would use a train. That means only a small number of people will ride the train for those middle stations.
Sure if you are building a track you can put in stations in towns that don't generation much traffic, but you still need traffic from somewhere and it won't come.
Well with Maglev, Portland to San Francisco could make sense via Sacramento. You wouldn’t want to do it on the coast because of the mountains, and there’s at least Redding and Ashland and a couple of other places in-between.
At 500 km/h (310 mph) you could feasibly do Sacramento to Portland in under two hours. The less straightforward question is how much of the metro area do you serve around those two cities, and do you connect that line directly to San Francisco or do you run a separate line to Sacramento via the Delta? Do you go a sort if L-shape around Stockton first? The politics of this could push travel time up, but at 500 km/h you can cover a lot of ground, much of it fairly empty.
So a hypothetical Best Coast system would connect Vancouver, BC to Portland, Portland to Sacramento, Sacramento to Reno, Reno to Las Vegas, Sacramento to LA, San Francisco to Sacramento via Stockton, San Francisco to LA, LA to Tijuana via San Diego, LA to Las Vegas, LA to El Paso via Phoenix, Phoenix to St. George, Las Vegas to Salt Lake City via St. George, San Diego to El Paso via Tucson & Mexicali and now you’re in Texas where options include El Paso to New Orleans via either Austin & Houston or San Antonio & Houston, Brownsville to McAllen, Brownsville to Houston via Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi to San Antonio, Houston to Dallas, Dallas to Oklahoma City and I’m probably missing some, but you have the workings of a Gulf Coast constellation anchored by Texas on one end and Florida on the other.
Thing is, I’ve worked this all out on paper too, including a Northeast, Southeast and Midwest map that looked much like one that someone linked to up the thread. Problem is, our choice of infrastructure is downstream from our cultural preferences which in turn are shaped by the infrastructure our ancestors built in the decades prior.
El Paso is about 725 miles away from San Diego according to Siri, so with the best trains in the world you could be inside the Texas rail constellation I briefly outlined above in about 2-3 hours which in turn could serve as the basis for a Gulf Coast constellation connecting Florida and the Southeast connecting to the Midwest and the Northeast and then to Canada.
It’s not built though because people just fly instead. We worked out how to get cheap air travel long before we figured out super-fast transcontinental rail travel that probably doesn’t make sense coast to coast but if it already existed, probably would make sense going coast to middle and middle to middle and would just happen to connect the coasts. Or you could just fly, which is what we do, and since that already exists and is even faster than rail travel, metro areas can figure out how their own inter-urban rail systems that are slow and local where it makes sense to build them and just try to make sure the airport is connected too. I like trains, but not so much that I’m willing to toss hundreds of billions of public money into some kind of “national rail system” whatever form it took for whatever prestige it might bring. Jumbo jets are cool too.
Wind resistance at ground level means that an airplane is much more energy efficient at those distances and speed. As such those distances are unlike to work just because an airplane is so much cheaper even if because of speed it is time competitive.
Here's a good video on one method of calculating what the sum of the smaller individual parts would be. This is for the north east corridor but the same thinking applies to any rail project.
It seems like about a million people live there, not nearly enough individually, and trains would likely alternate at which locations they stop to bring the total travel time between the larger areas down.
Might be hindered by the mountainous terrain though making the cost prohibitive.
"U.S. High Speed Rail: What's Next? Analyzing Extensions and Expansions, and What Makes Sense"
They did the math and decided to connect Florida to the main Eastern component (based on there being enough demand for Atlanta-Florida travel), so there are four components - the main Eastern component, Texas, California (+Vegas, Phoenix), Pacific Northwest (Portland to Vancouver)
I don't think you can take any national plan seriously if it doesn't include Chicago/Memphis/Jackson/New Orleans. Passenger rail service has been in almost continuous operation on that route since a little after the Civil War. It has to be there for the symbolism alone.
Levy addresses this, and agrees with you: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rai... Basically, Amtrak started out with the existing rail network, which is going
to be oriented to early-20th-century population centers, and so New Orleans is well-served by Amtrak standards. But a modern network in the South would be oriented more towards those parts of the South that have grown - Texas and the Piedmont - and less towards New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis.
American growth of the last 80 years is incompatible with the future of the world. You won't save a sprawly mess by putting a high speed rail station in the center of it.
If it was an important city before the age of the automobile, it has a chance. Put the "future" rail network in the cities that have a future.
Point number two, and probably even more important than the first, is the fact that you have to get your plan through a million committees, and through Congress, etc. You need support. His plan won't get it. Too much of it goes through places that hate trains and "socialism". And then it tells the people that have nostalgic memories of a railroad that lifted their family out of the Jim Crow south to go pound sand. His plan will never go further than his blog :)
Would you like an analogy to this situation?
Everybody in tech has incredible ideas for the future. But the startup world is littered with companies that have had no success at all getting from point A to point B despite billions in VC money.
Yes. It's an area with AT BEST stagnant growth, and likely contraction, versus areas like the Triangle in NC that are poorly served by rail and rapidly growing.
The entire Great Lakes region is decently densely populated.
- Columbus - Cleveland 142 miles
- Columbus - Cincinnati 106 miles
- Cleveland - Pittsburgh 134 miles
- Cleveland - Toledo 114 miles
- Columbus - Toledo 142 miles
- Toledo - Detroit 58 miles (Cleveland, Columbus, & Cincinnati can share this)
- Toledo - Chicago 244 miles (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, & Detroit can share this)
Theoretically, you can connect Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, & Pittsburgh into <3 hr trips by HSR.
That's going to beat flying. And that connects about:
- Chicago 9.5M
- Detroit 4.5M
- Pittsburgh 2.3M
- Cincinatti 2.3M
- Columbus 2.2M
- Cleveland 2.1M
- TOTAL = 23M+ people (~7% of the US)
For 940 miles of rail...
Even considering that HSR costs ~$100M per mile - that's about $4k per person.
That sounds like a lot. But since we have frequent opportunities to finance 30-year treasuries at ~1.5% interest and the Fed mandates inflation to be ~2% or higher:
=PMT(-0.005/12, 30*12, -4000)
That's about ~$10.30 per month per person. Considering the average tax payer is paying ~$1,300 per month in federal taxes - 0.7% of that going to HSR where it makes sense - does not seem like a terrible idea...
For context, highways cost about ~$200B per year - which comes down to ~$49.75 per tax payer per month - however, only about 1/4th of that is Federal taxes (~$12.43).
I'll also add that the Great Lakes is probably at the bottom of the list of regions where HSR would make sense. Other places like the Northeast make much more sense.
Maybe I am misunderstanding some of the intent. But yes, a rail from NYC to Miami is far, but when you chunk it up, it makes sense. For a NYC-Miami, you could have stops in Philadelphia, DC/Baltimore, Richmond, Raleigh/Durham, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Orlando. It would really depend on the route. Like a NYC-Portland OR or Seattle, you can make some pretty good stops from NYC to Chicago, but once you get past Chicago, there probably is any really good population centers for stops there between Chicago and Portland/Seattle. So in some areas, those distances can be justified, but for sure we have some that can't be easily justified.
The thing about NYC-Miami is that north of DC the population is along the coast but south of it the population is inland. A route via Charlotte and Atlanta probably pencils out better than one via Charleston and Savannah.
Yea it does. If your gonna make a stop in North Carolina/South Carolina, Charlotte would be a good spot because it would have some good access to then change transportation and go to Charleston or Raleigh or Greensboro. Didn't consider Atlanta though since that would be a lease direct route to Miami. You have to go back East to hit something like Jacksonville or Orlando. But the trade off is, Atlanta is probably a more wanted destination than Savannah. Or pehaps something like Augusta where you don't have to go as far West, but your still not too terribly far from Atlanta.
Sadly our 1000 mile trips currently take ~24 hours rather than the 5-6 that it could. Multiple factors for that: slow trains; long stops; cargo rail gets priority over passenger rail.
Even the fastest trains Amtrak offers ("Acela") are zoned - or permitted, not sure what the right term is here - up to 150 MPH, and only on specific portions of the route.
The sense is that the Northeast corridor has too many curves and roadbed issues to be able to go faster.
There would have to be constructed a new corridor, not in the same path as existing railroad rights of way, for not a small amount of money, and going through expensive real estate.
The political will for that is not in existence, so far.
And the fact is that while taking a train the full length of the Northeast Corridor takes too long to be practical most of the time, NYC to points north and NYC to points south works pretty well (i.e. is competitive with flying) with existing trains.
Easy to complain on the internet. Hard to change a hard left into a sweeping arc in the middle of New Haven.
Even ignoring the money, if you try and do a project like that you are going to get slapped in the face by all the same "cutting apart muh neighborhood" rhetoric that gets used against highways. Grade separation and "just paying those people to go away" are both expensive enough to be non-starters.
Highways and rail create different kinds of disruption in neighborhoods. Highways constantly have traffic, creating noise and pollution all the time. Railroads are mostly quiet, with loud traffic in short bursts.
Passenger railroads are narrower than urban highways. The US-101 freeway cuts through Echo Park and Westlake in Los Angeles, taking up as much as 330 feet of width, counting on/off ramps. California HSR has trench sections specced as narrow as 72 feet[1], and most of its urban rights-of-way are under 100 feet wide.
Walking next to the 101 in Echo Park you can see how it so starkly divides what was once a single connected neighborhood. The light rail lines (about ~40-50 ft to cross) in other neighborhoods don't give that impression.
I have no love for highway pits but to play if off like an HSR pit is some quaint little light rail is simply farcical.
You're being dishonest or ignorant. The fact that you compare max-width of one to min-width of the other rules out one option. A pit is a pit. You're limited to crossing at a few specific points no matter how narrow it is and traveling to those points accounts for the bulk of the distance covered. The physical width only matters if you're evaluating the neighborhood for visual appeal and not actual livability. "Quiet most of the time" doesn't really count for much because people acclimate to the background noise levels and that one train per hour is just as jarring as that one motorcycle with the insane exhaust per hour. At least with subways and airports it's every couple minutes so you get more used to it.
High speed rail is like having a jet plane go by,
given the intent to run at,
say 150 to 200 miles per hour,
and has its own troublesome neighbor issues.
It is 32 hours if driving 130-150 kph on the freeway (80-90 mph) without stopping for food, bathrooms, gas, or sleep. It's probably a few hundred hours with the train since you will have to go a few hundred or a few thousand kilometers north first.
Interestingly, there is a long train line from Louisiana to Los Angeles called the Sunset Limited. Up until Hurricane Katrina in 2005 it ran between Orlando Florida and Los Angeles,
On Amtrak, that's a 102 hour trip that takes you through Chicago and DC. Not an exaggeration. Given usual delays, that 102h is wildly optimistic. Coach seats: $387.
We're not talking about doing NYC - SF by train, but there are a lot of places where it makes sense.
As I used to live in the Bay Area, it really surprised me that there was no bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Yes, apparently it's planned but it boggles my mind that they waited so much before building it.
Americans don't realize how much nicer train is compared to plane for medium distances (up to 500 miles). Station being in the middle of the city, get in the train 10 minutes before departure without check-in or security, no waiting 15 minutes on the tarmac before disembarking... I guarantee you the door-to-door time is going to be lower.
Also train is more confortable, seats are wider, you can use phones/electronics for the full duration of the trip...
> Yes, apparently it's planned but it boggles my mind that they waited so much before building it.
Basically because there are only 2-3 places you can practically cross the mountains surrounding LA (Tehachapi Tejon, and the coast), and 3-4 places you can do the same for the SFBA. All of them are already occupied by existing rail or roads.
Those mountain crossings cost more that the rest of the system combined.
> get in the train 10 minutes before departure without check-in or security, no waiting 15 minutes on the tarmac before disembarking... I guarantee you the door-to-door time is going to be lower.
I wish, but you're wrong and it's not even close. (SFO, OAK or SJC) to (LAX, BUR, LGB or ONT) is about 45 minutes gate to gate. Add 5 minutes for security[], 25 minutes boarding, 15 minutes deplaning and you're at 1h30 curb to curb (vs. the almost 3 hours station to station that CAHSR claims* they will provide when finished).
The plane is faster even accounting for travel time to and from the station or airport. The contrast is especially stark if your destination is not downtown LA.
[*] TSA with PreCheck has gotten really fast in the past couple years. They no longer scan your boarding pass (just your ID + a database of the day's travelers). You don't need to unpack your bag, remove your shoes, nor remove your jacket. On a dozen trips in the past year, security has never taken me more than 5 minutes. It takes almost as long to walk through the maze of ropes forming the queue as the actual security procedure itself.
The biggest break for trains in the last 20 years hasn't been Maglevs or Japan's bullet. Matter of fact it has been OBL fixation on attacking America in a spectacular and televised fashion.
The lack of security abord trains is shocking honestly. Trains are special, there is something about them which calms people even the most evil, because ill intentioned people like terrorists and mentally deranged domestic shooters just ignore them.
I don't know why this is down-voted so, but to me also outside the US it seems correct? You bill for travel between stations, there'd be a lot more track & travel between stations in the US, on average, if it were as ubiquitous.
Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.
>>Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.
That is the problem in my opinion - I prefer sitting on a train, to sitting on a plane, but for most routes I need to travel (within the US) it takes longer to get there and is more expensive than flying - why would anyone want to pay more and waste more time? You either need to be faster or cheaper if you want my business.
The more rail improves the more I'm tempted to take it, with flying you have the additional time cost of just dealing with the airports, turn up an hour early, then get put in the metal tube where they won't serve you drink till they're up in the air, and you can't bring your own.
A train may take longer sometimes, but I find the whole thing much less stressful, you're not strapped to the seat, you have leg room, even a table, power sockets, bring your own food and drink, and the prices are competitive.
It still takes longer than I'd like to get from Switzerland to the UK, and that's mostly due to a lengthy change in Paris.
I think in France, and prob other countries too, their moving to ban domestic flights that can be done on rail instead
It's hard to overstate how different the European rail experience is from the American experience. SF<->LA is a 50m, $50 flight. It's approx. 9h and $400 by rail. In practice, the last time I attempted that route it took 15h because the train had issues halfway and none of the assigned seats had power or legroom.
Even the Seattle to Portland route, probably the best on the west coast, has issues. A flight takes about 50 mins and can be had for about $60. Alaska Airlines runs flights at least once an hour all day long. From 6am until midnight.
The train takes 3.5 hours (often closer to 4 and I've had it take more than 5 just because of freight priority). The train makes 4 trips a day (one being a longer route that is usually delayed) and the timing means that any business trip will probably require an overnight stay. The train is only $27 though because both states (especially WA) heavily subsidize the route.
In the end, it really comes down to where in the metro areas your trip begins and ends as to which works out best. For us, the train station saves about an hour of ground transport time compared to the airports and we can arrive much closer to departure, so the train works best. For plenty of others, the airport will be faster and probably easier logistically.
I don't really have a preference, but having done my first couple flights in close to 20 years in the past 3 months, I was struck by how much has changed in that time.
PreCheck and Global Entry weren't around when we went to Bermuda in August 2001. It was a trip notable not only for its proximity to 9/11 - by chance, my bag was searched either before we left L.F Wade in St. George's or on arrival back in Newark, but this happened without my knowledge and I only found out about it because customs had repacked it included a note informing me of this fact inside. - and also because a trip to camp the previous week was the start of an ear infection which burst my ear drum on the plane going down.
Fun times.
However, I quite like the idea of passport control on a train happening before you embark on the departing leg of a trip. With those formalities out of the way, just collect your bags at the destination and you're free to go.
I don't know if the FAA or TSA would consider this too burdensome to implement, but it's an idea.
They've been trying to implement passport control before boarding the train between NYC and Montreal for a while, but nothing seems to have come of it. It was an Obama-era priority.
I haven't taken that train in many years, but they basically stop the train at the border and immigration agents board and check everyone's passport. It's scheduled to take 2 hours. Really stupid. It's a 45 minute flight, and you go through US immigration in Canada before boarding the flight.
That's crazy. Perhaps a good comparison is the channel tunnel, e.g. going from London to Paris you go through security similar (a bit less onerous) to that at an airport before boarding.
That was the case even with the UK in the EU (maybe it's not any less onerous than an airport now actually, idk) but otherwise intra-EU over land is not an issue, almost necessarily. (But then, you might think that about Canada/US.)
There are some disadvantages, such as not being able to pickup anymore passengers until crossing the border. Probably a non-issue with Vancouver close to the border.
What about that piece of the US that's isolated from the rest, quite close to Vancouver I think, Fort something attached to the South of BC, accessible only through it. Do you have to go through something like that twice, or can you go between it and the main body of the US more easily (without stops perhaps)?
Or (facepalm, more obviously) Alaska for that matter?
A school bus runs from there to mainland USA and I suspect there’s an informal agreement to drive without stopping through Canada so they don’t have to bother too excessively with clearances.
> However, I quite like the idea of passport control on a train happening before you embark on the departing leg of a trip. With those formalities out of the way, just collect your bags at the destination and you're free to go.
It's better than that. Space on board is at less of a premium so train carriages can be made with plenty of room for luggage alongside passengers. No need to check baggage.
Nobody's asking for an express train between Jackson and Billings. When you exclude the Mountain States and Alaska, the US has about the same population density as Western Europe.
There's no good reason for us to have zero public transit options between Atlanta and Savannah, Madison and Milwaukee, Columbus and Cincinatti, Denver and Colorado Springs, or Mobile and New Orleans.
Quick sanity check here, because I've seen this claim and never bothered to check.
Let's say Western Europe = Germany, Austria, Italy, and everything west of them, i. e. Benelux, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain (= UK - Northern Ireland). (I'm including the UK and excluding Ireland because there are rail connecctions from Britain to the mainland but not from Ireland to Britain. I'm excluding Denmark because isn't that really Scandinavia?)
Total population: Germany = 84m, France = 68m, Britain = 66m, Italy = 59m, Spain = 47m, Netherlands = 18m, Belgium = 12m, Portugal = 10m, Austria = 9m, Switzerland = 9m, Luxembourg = 1m. Total is 383m.
Total area, in km^2: Germany = 358k, France = 551k, Britain = 228k, Italy = 301k, Spain = 499k, Netherlands = 41k, Belgium = 31k, Portugal = 88k, Austria = 84k, Switzerland = 41k, Luxembourg = 3k. Total is 2225k.
So the population density of western Europe is about 172/km^2 or 445/mi^2.
The only states this dense are DC, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware; New York and Florida are just under the cutoff.
If I've done the math right, DC + NJ + RI + MA + CT + MD + DE + NY + PA + OH (74m people/429k km^2) is the largest contiguous bunch of states which is over 172 people/km^2.
If we take the east to be everything east of the Mississippi, I get 190m people in 2.301m km^2, or 82 people/km^2. If we add in CA + OR + WA that actually drags down the density a bit.
So the densely populated bits of the Northeast/mid-Atlantic are as densely populated as Western Europe. But the eastern US as a whole isn't.
I agree that those pairs of cities you mentioned should have better connections between them though.
>There's no good reason for us to have zero public transit options between Atlanta and Savannah, Madison and Milwaukee, Columbus and Cincinatti, Denver and Colorado Springs, or Mobile and New Orleans.
Does regular bus service not count? Sure they're not publicly owned but does that result in any meaningful differences to the users?
Most of the US is nowhere close to as densely populated as Western Europe, even excluding Alaska and the mountain states. You can't just look at the land area and population and make a naive calculation of density.
Western Europe's population density gradient is much sharper than most of the US. Only the coastal corridor of the Northeast US really comes close. The gradient of the populations is important because it tells you how many people are within a usable range of the train stations.
Even if you've got a high speed line between Madison and Milwaukee what in the hell are you going to do once you step off the train? Neither city has impressive public transit and both are very spread out. A high speed link might save a boring drive between those cities but that savings would get eaten up by the intra-city travel.
One reason is that, once you arrive, options for public transport within the destination city in the US are limited. So you need a car once you get to your destination anyhow. What do you do when you step off the train in Atlanta or Savannah?
I just spent 7 weeks traveling around Europe by train. I would not have considered that approach without the extensive local public transportation systems. Atlanta is not remotely in the same league as Berlin in terms of public transit.
I’ve never been to the state of Georgia, but I was under the impression that both Atlanta and Savannah had pretty good public transit systems. Atlanta has a metro system (MARTA) which is the eight largest in the USA by ridership. And Savannah has an extensive bus network, and a walkable downtown area where transit is actually free to ride.
I agree that we should let density and demand drive construction of HSR.
That being said, there are plenty of plausible HSR routes in the US. We're a very sparsely populated country in our middle, but there's effectively a "string" of large cities right through our middle: NYC - Pittsburgh - Columbus - {Cincinnati, Indianapolis} - {Louisville, St. Louis} - Kansas City - Oklahoma City - Albuquerque - {Phoenix, Tucson} - Los Angeles.
All of the legs there should under 400 miles, and most should be under 200. There's also plenty of room for adjustment: Louisville - Nashville - Memphis - Dallas and then onward south, for example.
> the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high
The cost is high, but more painfully, the cost per-mile is higher than for the same distance of railroad in Europe or East Asia. That's not a result of pure geography.
Also, while the cost is high, it's not actually that large in comparison to the overall DoT budget, which is projected at $142B for FY2023. You could build a lot of train for that. Political will is a much more important factor. We just dropped $40B on the Current War without blinking.
Even so, this misses another key step: intercity rail in Europe usually connects seamlessly to metro rail, which is what makes it so easy and nice to use. But the cities themselves in the United States do not usually have rail systems to connect to. That's why the best near-term rail corridor IMHO is NY-Buffalo (subway) - Youngstown (possible Pittsburgh metro extension) - Cleveland (subway) - Toledo (possible Detroit metro extension) - Chicago, connecting to six subway systems.
Toledo directly to Chicago doesn't make a lot of sense. Most of the track would go through Indiana, which is at best indifferent to Amtrak.
Consider instead putting Detroit in between the two. The Chicago-Detroit route already operates at 110 mph, Amtrak and the Michigan Dept of Transportation already own the majority of the track and give routing priority to passenger trains. Amtrak and VIA are already talking about a Chicago-Toronto train that doesn't require passengers to disembark for immigration/customs, and their systems are already connected via a rail tunnel under the Detroit River.
Oh, yeah, that sounds pretty good. My main point is that you want to connect the long train to short trains.
In theory, if Raleigh and Richmond (both very "blue" cities and maybe open to it) built LRT systems, you could get another route in DC-Richmond-Raleigh-Charlotte-Atlanta, where the other three have existing intracity rail.
> the cost per-mile is higher than for the same distance of railroad in Europe
how does this make any sence, we have to deal with tonneling under or demolishing existing densely populated real estate along the route, literal mountains in the way, etc.
HS2 in UK caused an outrage, someone's farm was cut in half, houses had to be demolished, etc
I see no mention of 737’s and A320’s here or in most posts. Compare the price per mile with those of alternatives. The U.S. doesn’t even resemble Europe.
The Midwest cluster of cities which include Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St Louis, Columbus, and Detroit, have an extremely similar density and distance distribution compared to France, where high speed rail is incredibly successful. We could have successful high speed rail nearly everywhere in the US with a possible exception of the rocky mountain regions. I wish this density trope would die.
The real reason we don't have high speed rail is that right of way acquisition is ridiculously costly unless government is involved, and we don't trust our government to do it right. Probably justified, if urban rail costs are indicative.
You'd only want to build regional HSR systems that would connect cities that get a lot of traffic and flights between them and are under 300 miles / 500 km apart. So, the northeast corridor, connect California major cities, connect Portland to Seattle, connect Dallas/Austin/Houston/San Antonio.
In Canada, half the population lives near a nearly straight line from Quebec City to Windsor; you could put a high speed rail line down the middle of that.
It’s almost forgotten how much resentment Americans had to the private railroads. They would buy land along the tracks, refuse to make a stop in your town, and start a new town. There was a phrase, ‘railroaded’ to describe being a victim of this power imbalance.
As such, people saw the roads as belonging to everyone but railroads being to the benefit of a few.
Yeah partly because the roads were literally paid for by the state, specially the highways, and truck and bus companies don't have to pay for maintenance.
To go against the grain somewhat, I think distance is an overrated factor in regard to its impact in preventing US passenger rail adoption.
I think the most overlooked factor is poor intra-city transit and lack of mixed use density in our city cores.
I recently traveled to Germany on business, a few nights in Berlin then took the ICE inter-city train to Munich.
The ICE train dropped me off at the main station in Munich—my hotel was 7.3 miles driving from the main station. I was able to jump on the u-bahn and with a quick transfer at Odeonsplatz get to my hotel in half-an-hour including a 10 minute walk from the train station.
Door to door from Berlin to the hotel in Munich was 05:00 hours. If one were to drive, maps says 361mi/580km traveled if driving direct with a drive time of 05:30.
For comparisons sake, let's take a hypothetical trip from Dallas Union Station to Apple's engineering headquarters in Austin, TX 14.7mi/24.6km from the Austin train station.
According to Apple Maps, taking public transit would take 09:00 hours. Driving direct from Dallas Union Station to Apple HQ in Austin is 187mi/300km in total with a drive time of 03:00.
I've found many Newyorkers will respond to any negative comparison of the NYC subways to other cities with a retort of "but we have 24/7 service and they don't".
I kind of feel that 24/7 service is actually one factor in why the NYC subways have so many problems - both in terms of logistics and aesthetics.
My daughter, visiting home from college this weekend, took Amtrak from Richmond, VA yesterday. She's taking the train back Monday. Without delay, the train takes about 4 hours. Driving takes about 3 hours. Add an extra 15 minutes on each side for getting to/from the station, so 4:30 hours vs 3 hours. Distance is 150 miles (241 km).
Cost of the train is $42 (coach) each way. Cost of gasoline would be ~ $24 each way.
Her train yesterday departed about 30 minutes late and arrived an hour late. Supposedly it may have been traveling slower due to the heat wave.
That's just our national train system. Many municipalities have their own patchwork of train networks. Some off the top of my head: BART, LIRR, MTA, MBTA T, Metro (D.C., Atlanta), L (Chicago), Metrorail (Miami).
What really matter, obviously, is population density. And population density would justify passenger railways on the coasts and in more than half of the US:
Additionally, it's also based on the flawed assumption that transportation should adapt to the locations of where people live rather than the other way around.
Not if you already own the car. Then the cost of the car and insurance are sunk costs that do not count. Sure there is a little wear and tear, but that adds just a couple bucks.
If you buy a car/rent for that trip alone, then the cost of driving is far higher. However for most Americans the cost of a car is a sunk cost that cannot be counted. If you live someplace where it is possible to live without a car, then you can make that argument, but most of us do not.
The resale value of the car, insurance (even if you don’t do pay per mile, insurance quotes are generally going to have some basis in miles driven per year), and maintenance are all directly correlated with miles driven. So, while these are often treated as sunk costs, that is due to improper accounting.
So, to reiterate, the cost of driving is much more than the cost of gas.
Age of a car is the largest factor of value, not miles. Used to be cars wore out in 70,000 miles, but the 1970s are long gone. Yes miles lower the value of a car a bit, but not much.
I do a similar travel distance (between 213km - 230km by car on the highway) monthly minimum between Amsterdam - Brussels taking the inter-regional train (NS) (understand the "slow") : 2h45 for around 25-29 EUR each way if booked a few days in advance. The fastest one with the Thalys is 1h55 for around 90EUR. Driving take around the same time than the slowest way ~2h30.
The Amtrak trains are slow? I mean even adjusting for the potential 40 to 10km difference and the fact that the NS does between 8 to 10 stop depending where you want to go out in Brussels or Amsterdam, 4h for a 241km trip is slow.
It is a bit cheating as if you want to do Brussels - Arlon, a 190-ish km trip inside Belgium, it will take you 2h45. And if you want to more or less cross Belgium from North to South (Oostende to Arlon), 310-ish km trip will take you around 4h15 by train and between 3 to 4h by car due to the fact that you will take the Brussels ring road. So small country, yep. Still 4h for 241km is slow.
I thought that was so high, so I ran the numbers using some median and average values and I got pretty close.
The average vehicle costs $40k, is owned for 11 years, gets driven 13k miles per year, burns 25 mpg, gas costs $3/gal, insurance is $1500 per year, and the vehicle needs $900 per year in maintenance and repairs.
A lot of people spend far less than this (my car cost me $0.384/mile so far), and some spend far more, but it's not a bad approximation.
I used to think this too, now I live here the American system actually works pretty well. Railways are actually very busy with freight, which keeps it off the roads and freight doesn't mind pauses and running overnight. Lots of rural connections are much easier to drive. Even between cities its easier because for train connections you'd have to get to the station (usually central) where if you drive you can go directly where you want. As a result people are much more mobile and can live in a wider area in USA, where in Europe to commute to the office you really have to live near a train station.
This does make the fundamental assumption that train travel and driving are equal from a users perspective.
Train travel has the advantage of not needing to do the driving. You can spend that travel time doing something productive, rather than staring at tarmac. Additionally train travel is potentially more accessible (assuming proper investment in infrastructure). The obvious example being that blind people are never going drive anywhere, regardless of how “mobile” it makes them.
While your point about being close to train stations has some validity. For the vast majority of European urban, and sub-urban areas, a fast train connection is only 20-30mins away via local public transport. So living “close” in terms of time, doesn’t require you to be physically close to the train station.
Finally high-speed rail, is really fast. Up to 200mph fast, well over double what’s realistically safe in a private car. So while the train might not be direct, it’s going that much faster, you can still get to your destination quicker than a car.
To provide some context, many Amtrak lines are limited to 80mph, and only a small number can achieve Amtraks top speeds of 150mph. That’s ignoring the frequent delays due to track congestion and freight priority, which results in even slower average speeds. It’s not a surprise that trains look unappealing to many Americans, when the average US passenger train can only just keep up with a passenger car.
You're right of course, I've been stuck on the M1 on a Sunday night and watch a train doing 100 mph blast past. There are good and bad parts on either side. Yes driving means you dont need to concentrate, but you're stuck on someone else's timetable, you can't play your own music or stop off at interesting points along the way.
But that means the modern USA misses out on the inherent benefits of density. This is a weird counter rational behavior— it is in everyone’s perceived best interest to live in big separate homes, but the collective social economic benefit of living together is evident. Also evident is how sprawl sucks vitality from culture.
> Why anyone lives in apartments by choice is beyond me. The noise is absurd.
I am sorry but you westerners have no clue how to make decent apartments. London is full of 'luxury' highrises with basic design mistakes and complete failures.
In czech republic they would never build drywall separation between apartments, its always brick or concrete with real noise insulation.
The staircase is never attached to the walls of the unit, so you don't hear every step of people walking around
Premium towers here are built with zero green space. Buildings of 100's of units where every unit has their own boiler are a complete waste
Windows get built in such a way that it's impossible to clean them or install shades, etc.
Plenty of condos in the US (and I'm guessing London) use concrete walls between units. This isn't something magic that only the Czech Republic understands.
But concrete is pretty unfriendly to the environment and has a low expected lifespan. Much of the US is covered in trees, so an average apartment is primarily constructed from wood. Condos and apartments are generally constructed to different standards, due to the former being intended as a purchase, and the latter as a rental.
> But concrete is pretty unfriendly to the environment and has a low expected lifespan
reinforced concrete has low expected lifespan in exposed conditions because moisture causes rust causes degradation. The concrete used for division between units, as being discussed here, is unreinforced. As long as there's no sulfate-containing minerals in the aggregate (and it's protected from moisture), an unreinforced concrete block wall will last indefinitely.
Typical dividers in apartment buildings in the west are either concrete as I just described, or they are made with "steel studs" (C-channel with gypsum board). The latter is awful for noise isolation, while the former is okay (and better if some additional considerations are taken).
Apartment buildings in my (north american) experience are built to the same standards as condos. The only time wood would be used in either is in a low rise (<4 storey) construction, which tend to not have any of the density benefits that you want from multi-unit construction, and all of the possible downsides.
I'm more of a 6-8 storey with 90% lot coverage kind of person. 4 storey and less in north american jurisdictions fall under different building code regulations, and typically different municipal zoning regs. They tend to have lower lot coverage (leading to less density), more surface parking (leading to less walkability), lower construction quality (leading to worse complaints from noisy neighbours etc), lower building lifespan.
What noise? I've been living in an apartment for three and a half years and the noise is really not a big deal. The primary issue is being quite close to a busy-ish street, which can be annoying with the windows open. With the windows closed, it's basically a non-issue. And when I do hear my neighbours, it's heavily muffled and just turning on the TV is enough to drown it out.
Yes, older buildings can have terrible sound insulation, but modern apartments are well-built and you won't hear a thing (at least in Germany, and in my experience).
You are assuming you only have 2 choices, single-family home or apartment. That's a very American perspective because most of America only allows those two but in a proper city you have townhomes, duplexes, casitas, bungalows and many more options that aren't just apartments. However, most of American is zoned exclusively for single-family homes and not mixed-use so like the parent comment said, you don't get benefits of proper density which includes many home types.
I was going to say you're wrong because here in the NE there are loads of townhouses, duplexes and bungalows, but you're right - in the US single family homes and apartments dominate. https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/highlights.html
I love living in a walkable suburban neighborhood with a supermarket and home store within easy (sub-5 minute) driving distance. Quiet, spacious, ultra convenient. More so than living in the city, because I can carry my purchases in my car all the way into my house.
YMMV. Live where you want. There is no objectively better answer, just preference.
I walk <2 minutes to a grocery and home store.. I can carry my purchases from the store to my house, about as far away as a parked car. But this is ultra convenient, not all city living is that easy!
I get that, I live with children in an apartment in a city. However most people dont want that, the trend to WFH means people are moving to smaller, quieter locations away from other people.
Is that driven by preference or cost? In my own case, I moved to a smaller town (mostly) because it's a lot cheaper. Most of the denser areas I would prefer to live would be significantly more expensive than rural Appalachia.
Unless you are talking about dumb mass freight, freight does actually mind just staying around. Its just that all those things have been taken of the railroad.
> As a result people are much more mobile and can live in a wider area in USA
If they have money for a car.
> where in Europe to commute to the office you really have to live near a train station
That's nonsense. There are these things called bicycles and also these things called trams and buses.
> a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers
So does U.S., a lot more in fact. The length of Italy north to south is 1,320km, the distance from San Francisco to Chicago is 3,220Km and that's only 2/3rds of the east-west distance of the continental U.S. And there are two major mountain ranges to cross on that trip, and huge stretches with almost no population. (How many deserts to cross does Italy have?)
Trains need crews, the crews need to work in shifts, the crews need to be available along the way, even in Nowhere, Nevada. That causes delays and restricts schedules.
Getting to desert areas to maintain the rails takes time and resources. We're talking about large swaths of deserts and desolate land with absolutely no cities or towns for double-triple digits of miles.
I'm not convinced high speed rail would ever work in the US due to how entrenched the car culture is, regardless of the terrain.
In Europe with we have spoke-and-hub railways - want to get into London? There's almost certainly a local station near you in the suburbs. Then jump on the Eurostar to Paris. Get to Paris, and then get a local line back out to wherever you want to go.
Right now, it would have to be airport like terminals, and a multi-decade (if not century long) plan to connect the city centres.
In the US, drive to the new high speed mainline station outside the city, where there would have to be as much parking as an airport, and then get the high speed line to the destination, and then... hire a car?
Building a mainline station in many US city centres for high speed lines isn't going to work right now. There are too few local lines going in, and nowhere to build super-sized car parks.
I did sort of contradict myself there and say never and multi-decade plan.
Problems the US has:
* Lack of spoke and hub railways.
* Cars.
* Cost-per-mile, which if I understand correctly is a political and a union-thing.
* And just politics by itself.
It's not dissimilar in the UK, but somehow we muddle through it. I don't believe that "cheap" maglev will ever help the US, it's been around for decades, and the longest highspeed line built by the Chinese is 19 miles at a cost of "only" $1.3 bn (I'll leave it up to the reader about how realistic that construction cost would be in the West).
The US will still have the same problem huge construction costs, political lobbying from the airlines, no hub and spoke railways, a vast airport style set of car parking around any terminals that are built.
The West now suffers from pointless adversarial politics where the opposition votes the opposite to the government simply "because", and for no rational reason other than "it's the other party". Even once you get past that hurdle, it's how "cheap" is the cheapest bidder. Labour/labor laws and so on.
I would genuinely love to see the US lead the world with high speed rail, but I just can't see it.
China is backing off their high speed maglev trains. While it is possible to make maglev go that fast, wind resistance means it is far to costly. A large airplane (because it runs at 30,000 feet) is not only faster, it uses less energy.
If vacuum trains ever happen, then things change. However those are very expensive to build, and have safety issues. We can solve the engineering problems with safety, but the expense doesn't seem possible)
In the current planed and under construction high speed rail in the USA by far most large city stations are planned to go in (or near) the city center. Texas Central (planned) is only planning on building 2 big city stations which the go to the outskirts of Houston and Dallas respectively.
Meanwhile California High Speed Rail (under construction) is planning to build stations in downtown San Francisco (and anther close to the city center, and a third by the Airport in Millbrae), close to downtown San José, downtown Fresno, close to downtown Bakerfield and downtown Los Angeles. Palmdale is the only city over 100,000 which gets a station in the city outskirts in California, and Burbank gets one by the airport.
I’m guessing California High Speed Rail did the work and came to the opposite conclusion of yours, that it does—in fact—work to build mainline stations in many US city centers.
Travel between countries in Europe is improving every year too. Next week I'll be traveling from Bordeaux to Berlin (over 1,600km) - it's faster than the car (16 hours by car vs 12 hours by train), and cheaper than flying, in the summer at least (150 euro by train, vs 300 euro by plane - booking 6 weeks before).
That will improve next year too with the direct Paris Berlin train that should only take 7 hours.
And that's why they prefer a mode of transport that requires you to drive an hour outside the city in traffic, arrive at least an hour before your flight so you can go through the indignity of airport security, take an hour long flight, and then wait for bags and then drive an hour back into your destination city in traffic?
Total time 4 hrs.
Or they prefer driving through traffic from one city to the other for 4.5 hrs where they have to have complete concentration so they literally don't die and kill a bunch of other people?
As opposed to a 4.5 hr train ride where they have lots of seating space, an extremely comfortable ride with great views where they can basically just sleep through the trip and/or work comfortably on their laptops with great wifi?
These are not hypotheticals. These are literally your options if you were to travel from NYC to Boston.
All the modes of transport take about 4-5 hrs. Train is significantly better in almost every way. The only problem is that Amtrak subsidizes the rest of its highly unprofitable network which means they price gouge the NorthEast corridor and under invest in it, making it more expensive, and not as good as it should be.
Even with a sub par train service relative to European and Asian counterparts, train is easily the best option on this route.
That does assume you live conveniently to the train station in Boston or the suburban station to the south. I do generally take the train to NYC but mostly because I hate driving into NYC so much. I have to drive an hour in the wrong direction to get to Route 128 so the time tradeoff actually isn't great.
Trains in the US are widely prevalent! It's just that they're used for freight rather than passenger travel. The main driver behind this is the population density of the USA, cities are spaced too far apart to make passenger travel by train viable. Not coincidentally, the only area that does have significant passenger rail networks, the DC - Boston corridor, has population density similar to Western Europe.
For long hauls, we use our RRs to move freight and airlines to move people. By traveling at 600mph instead of 60mph (the speed of most European train travel - intercity high speed rail is rare and expensive) I can get to anyplace in the continental US in under 5 hours from my home in Austin.
Intercity trains often go much faster than 60mph. More like an average of 90mph with a speed limit 125mph on the main lines in UK. Thats not even the HS1 (and eventually HS2), that's on our old AF Victorian rail roads.
The argument for trains is often more about taking out the need to drive everywhere than the need to fly from coast to coast though, as a train is never going to beat that.
As an American, it doesn't really boggle my mind at all. We have a very car-centric culture. Just look at how we treat cyclists/cycling infrastructure, especially in cities. It's night and day compared to most European cities.
To be fair though, the continental US is almost double the size of Europe and Amtrak is actually alright in the areas that it serves (although my experience with trains in Switzerland/Italy was definitely much better).
Trains "work" in Europe because many European cities are easily walkable. The trains (and other public transportation) comes every 10-15 minutes, so you can leave and arrive when you want to.
Now, consider the convenience of traveling by car: You can leave and arrive when you want to. For a longer journey, you don't need to deal with transferring between trains/busses/whatever, which means that you can keep your luggage in your car until your destination. Chances are, you can park your car at your destination or very close.
As far as sprawl: In some places, building codes require more land. Other times, banks won't lend to build unless the land is worth a certain percentage of the building. For example, when I built my house, the bank wanted the land to be worth about 25% of the value of the house; and the town required that it was so many feet away from the road. That forced my neighborhood to have large, open lawns. (And as much as I love my lawn, I'd be just as happy with a postage stamp yard too.)
There's also the rumor that the US was deliberately built to sprawl after WWII as a way to survive a nuclear attack. I don't know if that's true or a rumor, though.
I live near Boston in the US. In five hours, you can get as far north as Portland Maine (there's no passenger rail service north of there), and as far south as Philadelphia, and as far west as Albany.
In New York, you can probably do better, but if you leave the Northeast Corridor (the stretch between Boston and Washington, DC, along the coast) destinations to other major cities like Montreal will take around nine hours (if they ever restart that service post-pandemic), and even the fastest train to Chicago takes around 20 hours. NYC to Los Angeles? at least 70 hours.
How far can you get to by train from Paris in 70 hours?
> How far can you get to by train from Paris in 70 hours?
NYC->LA is about the same as Paris->Moscow and that takes nearly 3 days as well. Paris Instanbul is similar distance which is a little quicker but still over 2 days.
I'm visiting Italy in a month and have multiple tickets booked on Italo's Club Executive class. The seats look sweet and the price was surprisingly affordable. Looking forward to see how good it is.
Italy is much smaller than the US. It’s about the equivalent size of New Mexico - which has 1/30th the population (2M).
Public transit isn’t bad - I told on an Amtrak from LA to SD yesterday which was quite nice.
But, I also rode on the LA metro which was filed with mobs of mentally ill marauders.
My experience to Rome (albeit a bit over a decade ago) was similar. That’s an off putting response that likely plays a big role in sinking demand for public transit - esp. as compared to a car.
Of course, America was also designed for the auto - we’re newer, and gas was cheap during the highway construction heyday.
There are plenty of higher density areas within the US though, where trains would be a good option. Maybe Cyanide Springs, Oklahoma to Blandsville, North Dakota doesn't make sense for trains, but you could do bits of the PNW, California and the east coast with higher quality rail pretty successfully.
I think any answer to this has to involve two staples of American culture, cars and racism.
The prevalence of both has been a big detriment to rail initiatives. For whatever reason people have associated a nearby train station with crime and opening up the neighborhood to the "wrong people".
And the incredibly cheap and ubiquitous car culture (especially in the post-war period) provided the alternative. That of course interacts with the dramatic lack of density for new post-war suburban neighborhoods as well, which is a function of both issues mentioned (cars and racism) as well as the fact that the US does indeed (or did) have a whole lot of extra space compared to Europe.
I used to walk past a bus station to lunch most weekdays. Nearly every single day I witnessed an assault at the bus station. Mass transit hubs do bring crime. Why minimize that?
They just… don’t, elsewhere. That’s not a normal state of affairs. Something is horribly wrong with how you’re doing something - either with the stations, or with society - if that’s the case.
Assaults on mass transit in the US aren't what I'd call a normal state of affairs. I haven't seen it yet in person, though clearly it happens. Petty theft is a good bit more common, though like 99% of the time I just see people doing their thing and ignoring everyone else on the bus/train/whatever.
I read comments on HN and kind of wonder if this is why people believe all these terrible things about the US. Never been here, and only have comments online to judge by. Explains a lot.
I never realised we had Stalinists over here - thats a line of seasoning he would endorse - gather up all the poor and the undesirables, send them off to a gulag and the rest of us don't have to be bothered by them.
Actually Stalin doesn't fit, it's more of a victorian england or feudalist line of thinking
I wonder if it loads the entire set of isochrones when you open the page, given how incredibly responsive it is. I tried to share it with someone who would really enjoy it, but alas, no luck at all.
The isochrones are loaded over the network on mouse hover. I thought that scheme would keep working and remain fast since the loaded vector data is completely static.
I guess the /api/isochrones/<id> url does point to some server-side code which couldn't keep up, unfortunately.
Actually, Vercel is returning "This Serverless Function was rate limited." and a 429 code i.e. too many requests. So it's more of a "hitting the limits of the Vercel plan" problem than anything.
Why some parts of Europe is missing, e.g. Greece? Source seems to have data for it. Also, it would be neat to see more countries of the world mapped out: Japan, US for a start.
So which starting point covers the largest number of people you can reach? I am guessing Brussels since it covers a good portion of the Blue Banana, plus Paris and other big French cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana
(Semi)surprisingly, Strasbourg looks like a good contender as well, as it covers a good portion of the blue banana, most of Germany, and about half of France
There is a lot of what-if here, but the reality is that most people in the USA prefer the flexibility and speed of (1) Driving wherever and whenever and carrying all your stuff with you, and then (2) flying to your destination for speed. You can cross the east coast in 3 hours or the go to the west cost in 6 on a convenient red-eye.
Taking the train is more a novelty, and unclear who would actually use it regularly because it takes much longer (10 hours east cost, 20 hours coast to coast), transport on either endpoint requires you to park or taxi, and you lose all flexibility.
We like the idea of the train more than the reality of the train. I've lived in various places around the world where you had to take mass transit always, and all it does is add one to two hours to your commute when I would have much preferred to drive.
I can’t say that’s accurate. For my area it shows that Kassel is 3 hours away, although direct train goes in less than an hour, and even with intermediate stop, it’s slightly more than an hour. South of Germany isn’t connected at all, although I can get to Ingolstadt in less that 5 hours…
Being in the east of France, it's a bit sad how misconnected we are with the west of France. (Lyon <-> Bordeaux you'd think can be done in 2 hours, but no it'll take like 6 hours).
I wish we had this attitude in California! Bordeaux is a city of roughly the same population and economic activity as Fresno, but there are many in California who still argue that Fresno should not be connected by high-speed rail to any place.
California's cities are all arranged in a line, it should be the easiest high-speed rail project ever, but it languishes due to lack of imagination.
We're of completely opposite minds on this. A stop in Fresno should have been sacrificed so that California High Speed Rail could still happen for the majority of the state. Routing through the Central Valley was practically required for political reasons, and now the entire project has collapsed into a parody of itself.
California's cities are not all arranged in a single line. They are in two roughly parallel lines, separated by up to hundreds of miles and across mountains. There are the coastal cities of SF, SJ, SLO, LA, and SD (follows highway 1) and the Central Valley line of Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lancaster/Palmdale (follows highway 99 mostly). The 5 is a compromise interstate that runs in between these two, and there is very little development there. If you've ever driven the 5, you know what I'm talking about. Even most towns "on" the 5 are a few miles away.
The HSR line could have been drawn from LA to SF more or less following the 5, stopping at the outskirts of Bakersfield and then zooming straight through to a fork that stops next in either Gilroy (en route to the Bay Area) or Modesto (en route to Stockton and Sacramento). This would have been cheaper, shorter, and less encumbered by the need to get permits, approvals, easements, and the like from everyone in the Central Valley. Meanwhile, the chosen HSR route through the Central Valley runs through dozens of different counties, cities, tax districts, and regional planning agencies.
Also, Fresno is far less dense than Bordeaux, and has a population that generally considers a mile to be a "long walk."
> A stop in Fresno should have been sacrificed so that California High Speed Rail could still happen for the majority of the state.
Sacrificing the stop in Fresno (and the other Central Valley cities) would not have enabled HSR for the majority of the state. If anything, it would have made it less viable, not only politically (both in terms of federal and state politics), but also in terms of meeting the actual official goals of the project.
The problem with this logic is that an SF-LA line that serves nothing else actually fails to serve most of the state. The median Californian lives in Ventura, so if you just want to serve a majority you can do LA-SD and call it done. Or, you can do Bakersfield-Chico with a spur to SJ and Oakland, you’re also serving the majority of the state that way.
The latter is way easier to build in particular the spine through the Capitol.
> The problem with this logic is that an SF-LA line that serves nothing else actually fails to serve most of the state.
LA plus the Bay Area is most of the State, but travel between those two endpoints is a lot less than that plus travel between each of them and the Central Valley, and along the Central Valley’s North-South axis.
We're missing a high-speed connection here. The Bordeaux-Sète line is relatively slow (130-160 km/h) and handle a lot of different traffic (freight, regional, TGV, intercity). If the Bordeaux-Toulouse high-speed line is done (planned 2032), that travel time would be shortened.
This is great, but it would be better if the selection of the station was a textbox or a smaller map. Right now you have to zoom in to select a station, and then carefully zoom out to see the reach.
I just realized it's not symmetric. If you click Paris it highlights Perpignan (in the South), but if you click Perpignan it doesn't reach Paris at all. Same for Brussels and Newcastle.
Sadly, the trains on the Isle of Wight (off the South Coast of England, south of Southampton and Portsmouth) is not included.
I'd be interested in their perspective since you can buy a 'train' ticket which includes a ferry crossing, so the isochrone would either extend up to London and beyond (if you allow the ferry), or be restricted to just the island itself (if you do not).
That is a very nice app and, funnily enough, I was doing this manually (via Trainline) yesterday after watching this Wendover Production video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9jirFqex6g.
One suggestion for the app: allow us to pin a city when clicking on the desktop version ;)
Sometimes city walkability is expressed more simply: each spot gets a color based on the size of the area that you can reach in a fixed amount of time.
You might be able to get from New York City to Boston within 5 hours. If you're leaving from Fargo, though, it would be hard to make it into neighboring Montana.
Our best case for taking a coast-to-coast train is 72 hours, but I've never seen a long Amtrak train arrive on time.
Ukraine data is incorrect, before latest invasion we had multiple semi-fast trains reaching 120-140 km/h between regional centers. Though if it is snapshot of current state of affairs then it can be like that, a lot of trains were canceled or slowed due to war.
This is very timely. In September I will have four days of down time with my wife in Paris. We want to get out of town but don't know where. This gives us some options.
If anybody here has suggestions where we can spend a few days taking in non-Parisian France, let me know.
I really liked Strasbourg. France meets Germany in a compact historical center, 2hrs each way from Paris on the TGV. Just go when the EU government is not meeting there, because for 4 days a month, they all have to pack up from Brussels and move to Strasbourg. Reims and the Champagne region are on the TGV to Strasbourg as well, making that an easy day trip from Paris.
There are also the night trains (Intercities de Nuit), which go from Paris to some destinations at the periphery of France that are way too long for a normal day trip. It is usually 4 or 6 bunks in a room, but you can pay extra to book the entire room for the two of you. Go to sleep in Paris and wake up 12 hours later in Nice on the Med coast, Briancon (ski resort town in the Alps, great in Summer too), or any of the medieval towns in the Pyrenees near Spain (Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan)
Thanks for the Strasbourg tip. That's one of the places I was looking at based on the map. The German cultural influence drew me in. Thanks to your comment I checked the EU schedule and found they will be in Strasbourg at the same time.
I like the idea of a night train, but there is a significant chance either my wife or I won't be able to sleep. That would make the next day unpleasant, so we'll save the night train for some time when we have a few more days to spare.
I've had an Amtrak train delayed by more than 5h on the West Coast, so here at least the answer is potentially 0. I grew up in the NE USA where Amtrak is usable, if not up to European standards, so trains here are particularly disappointing.
So it works now and I am sort of disappointed. I can get to Paris and London, which, don't get me wrong, is nice. But Paris is I think three hours and apparently I can't get to anywhere South of there in five.
Very well done! I played around with this sort of stuff many years for a property search engine startup. I tried to make a “max commute distance” filter. It was much harder than I thought at the time!
I don’t like trains though, it takes so long especially in a large country like the US. Great for recreation purposes or travel within places closer than 3 hours by car but not otherwise.
You probably couldn't build HSR from SF to Detroit to NYC for a trillion bucks. But it would be an interesting project nonetheless. With strategic stopping points, I wonder how the population dynamics for the flyover states would change.
Interesting that it uses 20 minutes. I guess that's optimistic if you need to account for delays, but that's much longer than I often take to transfer (5 minutes often being workable if the trains are generally reliable, and you're able to catch a later train if you miss the intended one).
Swizerland (SBB) has some nice data on this with 98.9% connection punctuality, 40% of connections <5min and 77% under 10min. Though they might be an outlier here given the integrated timetable.
Indeed the 20 minute interchange assumption interacts quite badly with Swiss schedules, because actual Swiss interchanges are routinely much tighter than that, so each is penalized with 30 or 60 minutes extra for the next connection.
It depends on the station. If you're in Leipzig Central and you need to switch from platform 20 to platform 6, 5 minutes is very stressful because of the sheer number of platforms you need to walk past.
> In reality there is a train e.g. every hour or so, or even none at the same day
That really depends on your route. Some busy lines in the UK have trains every 30 minutes, 15 minutes or even 10 minutes. Across London, it might be every 5 minutes or even every 2.
The installation used realtime data (Google directions API): I somehow figured out, that if I would run this from a local machine and reset the browser frequently, Google would let me do this even without an API key… they certainly sensed something was awry and I did get API warnings and captchas because of 'suspicious traffic on my network', but they were nice enough not to block me completely. I strongly doubt this would still work though, this was in 2017.
Pictures and videos of the installation: https://maschinenzeitmaschine.de/derweil/