Japan and France have 'em, why not us? Is it all about cost? Liability? NIMBY?
I wonder if, as oil prices continue to rise longterm and congestion worsens, we’ll reach a point where it would be cost-effective to lay new track from LA-Chicago-NYC, or in the DC-NYC corridor, or (what the hell) even down along the East Coast to Miami. Or does it look like aircraft and cars/buses are going to be the name of the game into the foreseeable future?
One reason is that once you suggest it, folks look at Amtrak and wonder if we’re going to have the same accidents, except faster. Plus, compare potential service areas, especially versus Japan.
Also, I read that in many places, the existing tracks are so overloaded with freight trains that the passenger trains can hardly run on time. How much more new track would you have to lay to avoid a similar problem repeating with the new lines, especially since such would be a tempting option for those who need to get freight from one city to another quickly?
Not that it’s necessarily unviable; just a lot of obstacles in the way, practically and politically.
When do have high-speed trains in the Boston- Washington corridor. The Acela trains do moderately well and are fairly popular. They have been shut down for weeks a few times because of maintenance problems in things like the brakes.
I suppose they may be able to add the same to a congested West Coast route but that is pretty much the end of the line. The U.S. is so much bigger than Japan or even all of Western Europe that it isn’t very comparable. The cities are spread out and it is very hard to find the rider density on anything but the two places mentioned above. Even the speediest trains are still much slower than planes and the trains won’t be able to go full speed through most of the trip. I don’t know the cost of laying even one 3000 mile coast-to-coast high speed rail but people won’t be happy about it especially considering the problems above.
Planes just suit the country much better so there is little point in building a second-class alternative. The one things trains can offer is comfort but the airline industry has shown that all most travellers care about is cost and speed.
A few years back there was a referendum in Texas on a plan to construct a series of high-speed rail corridors using French TGV-type trains to link several of its major cities, including Austin, Dallas and Houston. Outside the East and West coasts, this would have been one of the more suitable areas for this type of transport, linking city pairs 200-400 miles apart and thereby providing door-to-door transport times comparable to air travel for similar distances. IIRC, the initiative was voted down by a landslide.
Private transport for relatively short distances, and air for long, apparently are too deeply entrenched in this country to make attractive an expensive system of dedicated high-speed rail lines, especially since it appears heavy subsidies would be needed to finance any such project. High-speed trains are unlikely to gain a foothold here unless something drastically changes the economics of the current travel modes, which despite numerous hassles are percieved as working more or less adequately.
One of the important issues with high-speed trains is that they need special tracks. Slow trains might occasionally be able to use these, but you can’t run a high-speed train at high speed on any normal track.
High-speed tracks are significantly more expensive, both to install and to maintain. Safety pretty well requires that level crossings be eliminated, which adds another serious measure of cost. So you’re definitely talking BIG money for the infrastructure.
Some quick googling and back of envelope googling turns up the following
Shanghai’s new express can reach a top speed of 430kph (267mph) in just under two minutes.
a mile of track costs at least £3.5m to build and that’s not including the cost of the giant electricity substations
The technology uses five times less energy - per passenger mile - than jet aircraft. Maglev trains cost a few million pounds per vehicle, compared with $200m for the average Boeing 747.
(cite Probably the world's fastest train | Research | The Guardian)
For 500 miles of track you would be looking at: Total cost = $3,395 Million = 16 Boeing 747
Not sure about noise and land land acquisition issues for such a train however.
On the surface it would seem that a high speed train would pay for itself pretty quickly, and I know that if I had the option, I would much rather take a train for a 500 - 1000 mile trip than put up with the hassle of airports.
And assuming the security procedures to be much laxer total travel time would be less.
Also, reading further, although it is still only a test at this stage: “At Tsuru (Japan) there is a small observation deck and visitor centre that overlooks the single kilometre where the maglev emerges from its tunnel. In December, the Japanese maglev reached 581kph, breaking its own Guinness World Record of 552kph (with passengers aboard) set in 1999”
At 580 km/h coast to coast in the US would be a 7 hour trip. Not much longer than a flight.
Thanks, everyone. In my more pie-in-the-sky moments, I think it’d be cool to have a coast-to-coast maglev or even vactrain line, but I know it’ll be a loooong time before that happens - if ever. There are periodic proposals to put in high-speed rail (although not as fast as the French or Japanese versions) between Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, but it never gets beyond the talking stage. =Sigh=
I wonder if the new security requirements at airports make a difference?
We generally have huge distances between places people want to go. Not like Europe or Japan. Outside the corridors where we do have well-used high-speed train service, it just takes too long for most people not to go by air, and it usually costs more anyway.
The infrastructure cost has a lot to do with it too. Tracks, and the land under them, are expensive to build. Air is free.
Sorry, but Acela isn’t a particularly high-speed train. From your link:
Makes the NYC-DC run a whole 12 minutes faster than the Metroliner used to, when it was first introduced nearly 40 years ago:
Cost and speed?? If you’re going from D.C. to Philadelphia, are you going to fly? Hell, no - you’ll spend more total time, door-to-door, than if you drove. And going from D.C. to NYC, you might come out slightly ahead of driving, time-wise, but not much.
A genuine high-speed train, with track dedicated to passenger trains, would be a real boon here in the Northeast Corridor. If there were a train that could get me from DC to NYC in an hour or so, and didn’t cost a fortune for the trip, I’d visit NYC a lot more often.
We would. But consider how many fatal motor vehicle accidents we have every year. Train wrecks get all the attention because they’re spectacular and might kill a lot of people at once; auto accidents are so common we hardly notice them. But if we had high-speed rail here and you rode it regularly, you would still have far greater odds of dying in a car crash.
There is an organization devoted to high-speed rail in the U.S. – see here. And here (middle of page) for a map of the conceived national rail network.
See also this old GD thread.
I hope, within our lifetime, you will be able to travel by HSR from Anchorage, Alaska, to Santiago, Chile, without changing trains.
First off, the cost for the track alone is nothing to sneeze at. Secondly, since New York City would presumably be somewhere along that 500 miles (Boston to Richmond? NY to Raleigh-Durham? Which two populous metropolises are you trying to connect with this rail? And what several HUNDRED cities and towns along the way will be inconvenienced by this thing without actually benefiting/ being serviced by it?), land acquisition would be a pretty steep bump on the final price tag. Rail travel, whether it’s Amtrak or a big city’s subway system, tends to require heavy subsidies and breaks down/obsolesces before it ever “pays for itself.” While a 747 uses lots of expensive fuel, it doesn’t require a huge and special rail infrastructure between its ports of call.
Take the actual cost of building/operating this George Jetson-ey geegaw, divide it by the number of people actually using it times the average number of times they will actually do so, and that’s one pricey commute. And you’ll pay that anyway, whether you ever ride the damned thing or not. California tap water will be a thrilling bargain by comparison.
Is there similar security at European and Japanese train stations? Does anybody know?
Accela was a compromise to use existing tracks, alongside commuter rail It’s biggest advantage is being able to tilt during turns, not high speed. As pointed out above the relatively straight DC to NYC run doesn’t shorten the trip that much, the much curvier NYC to Boston run does see a much better gain compared to non-tilt trains. IIRC that run, if all the curves are added up creates 12 complete circles.
Even so it has made a dent in airline travel, as airline adds have directly went up against Accela.
We just need a time of building great projects, such as the original period of railroad construction, or the interstate system to make these things a reality.
I don’t trains really helping in cross country travel, It just takes too long, but for shorter runs, lets say 500 miles or less, could offer a very nice alternative.
From one of the pages you linked to:
And price too, I’m guessing; it would be cheaper to buy every man, woman and child who ever would ride the thing a Ford Taurus each, and have them ride those instead. The DC Metro is heavily subsidized and will not break even in my lifetime. Or, you know, ever, actually.
Can’t we just bring back Zeppelins? They’ve gotten a hugely unfair rap.
I think, for the US, we will see automated high speed cars long before we see a decent rail system.
You must have picked that route for a reason. Why? There is no one that would actually take that route and it would take 40 hours to go the 8000 miles with a wildly optimistic average speed of 200 mph.
Ah, but you counter that people would travel between Anchorage and Seattle (not many because there aren’t that many people in Anchorage to begin with) and the Seattle to San Francisco and then San Francisco to LA. Then what? You have to start crossing over country borders and that adds complexity. There isn’t even a road between Panama and Colombia as you cross into South America. It is 30 miles of jungle and they left it there for a reason. That would have to be cleared if they let them.
That brings up mega-problem #1. This would require cooperation between some very different (and some very poor and corrupt) countries. Mega problem #2 is the financing because it is shared between countries and won’t ever turn a profit. Mega problem #3 is that most of this route is useless for all practical purposes. Once you get into South America, the nature of your train route takes on a very different personality. The people tend to be poor and the dynamics between the cities are very different.
There must be a way around this right? I think there is. I imagine a system where the transportation doesn’t have to be worried much about the landscape or the countries it is passing through. It could just pass right over them and would ideally be much faster. Travel limited to a single route per line would also not be that important. This system could move around freely and even go somewhere other than planned if the conditions dictated it. This is all Jetsons stuff of course so I won’t hold my breath.
It does, but that fuel carries a lot of passengers a long way at a high speed. In terms of passenger-mile fuel efficiency, it’s rather good: assuming good load factors, 60 to 70 passenger-miles/gallon is realistic.
Well, laying track to Anchorage would be quite an achievement - and hideously expensive. Given that it will certainly be 40 (could be 100) times as expensive to connect to Anchorage as to Los Angeles, this looks practical when Anchorage reaches, say, 20 times LA’s current population.
If HS rail has a role, it’s going to be along the routes where lots of people want to travel. It offers potentially lower per-passenger costs in return for very high initial costs and a requirement for high load factors.