Planet: Seems like the only non-monetary benefit it provides is making liberals feel happy. If you could call that a benefit.
That’s not a bad idea. It would be a great way to reduce rush hour conjestion because you could charge more to use the product when it’s in greatest demand.
I’d rather not have a giant government-operated train system. That’s likely to be extremely inefficient and poorly managed. It does not have to be, but it seems likely. Anyway, roads, for all the maintenence they need, do not require so much constant care as a high-speed train. The plain fact of the matter is that people do not want to have to use a train if they can drive: and when they get to their destination, they probably want to drive there, too.
Anyway, with regards to the OP, there are some limited markets in the US. Japan and Europe, though are very different environemnts. The vast majority of Japan’s population lives along a single thing line stretching along the country, with most of the rest living on the opposite shore or in Northern Kyushu. Heck, 10% of the nations population live in the Tokyo area alone! Trains are a lot more efficient and a lot more convenient there.
Europe is like that, albeit to a lesser degree. Gasoline is more expensive, too.
America is not like that, and probably never will be. Amtrack sucks because it maintains a bunch of unprofitable lines not many people use. If it could concentrate on the Eastern Corridor/Western Corridor routes, they’d be in much better shape.
Lyon is 450km from Paris, I guess that must be around 280mi. The TGV with its top speed of 300kmh (187mph) needs 2h, from station to station. The railway stations are in the city centers so you don’t need to be there 30min or even 1h before “takeoff” and you don’t need to take a cab into the city center after “landing”.
No airline could ever make me change and take the plane.
Needless to say that the service is excellent, you can take as much luggage as you want, you don’t wait for your luggage, there is no bothering security check, you buy your ticket a couple of minutes before you travel…
It wouldn’t be less congested simply because it cost money. Depending on the type of toll setup, there can be even more logjams due to traffic waiting to get through tollbooths.
Of course, if more and more people use EZPass or a similar automated toll payment system, this might not be a problem.
What about the inherent inflexibility of trains as opposed to planes? If I need to shift more service from one city to the next, to respond to market changes, I can’t do that as easily with a TGV type system unless it’s connected to all the major cities. If I need more planes on route B, I can shift them from route A tomorrow.
I used to fly between NY and Boston quite a bit and there used to be a shuttle flight service that opperated just like Flonks describes the TGV. In fact, you boarded the plane and paid for the tickets during the flight. If you missed one flight, you hopped on the next one that left 15 minutes later. And it took about 1 hr or less to travel that distance (about 200 miles). I guess that security is tighter these days slowing things down, but if trerrorists use trains for some horrific act in the future, we’ll have the same problem there. It’s not inherent to the airline business.
You’d have to use an EZPass-type system to make it work. Anyone who used to drive I-95 thru CT years back can remember the ridiculous system of stopping every “x” miles to throw a damn quarter in the bucket.
How about a high speed train in Canada? I can remember a Canadian friend of mine describing his country as “one dimensional”. A large portion of the population lives along a narrow corridor, parallel to the US/Canadian border. Seems like Canada would be ripe for this type of system before the US would be. Besides, wouldn’t all the Frenchies in Quebec just love to have a Train a Grand Vitesse?
I believe they still do this on the Garden State Parkway, but it’s been a while since I was there. Awful system.
What counts a lot on short distances and what you can’t beat is the accessibility of the railway stations. They are right in the center of the cities whereas airports tend to be at least 20-30 kms away.
The only exception I know is Ronald Reagan Airport, but then again it is awefully loud. When you eat an icecream in Georgtown you can hear the planes every couple of minutes during the rushours. And since 911 Ronald Reagan has real tight security checks (a pain in the ass).
You mean move the equipment from one route to another? That’s pretty easy to do with a railway because there’s already a nationwide network of railways tracks. Even if a new high-seed network is constructed, the train cars will most likely be compatible with the existing networks. The French TGV trains run on both dedicated high-speed tracks and older conventional tracks. There are even trains designed to run on two different gauges (track widths) and several different electrical systems.
Trains have been hijacked and bombed by terrorists just like airliners. But there are a few major differences that make airliners more effective as a target for terrorism and hijacking. You can’t hijack a train and take it to another country (except Canada and Mexico). You can’t use a hijacked train as a weapon to attack a building - all you can do is kill the passengers. And even if you try to take the passengers hostage, it’s difficult to contain all the passengers on the train because trains usually have emergency brakes and emergency doors that can be operated by passengers.
It’s not quite as “one dimensional” as your friend believes, although it is to an extent. We do have train service to northern communities through our national rail carrier, VIA Rail, as well as other regional carriers, such as Ontario Northland. They will (and do) serve communities whose only link to the outside world may be through the railway. Still, your friend has a point, and most passenger rail in Canada goes east-west in the southern portion of the country.
As far as the OP goes, I think the problem is not that we (I’ll include Canada and the US together, since our rail networks are pretty much integrated–freight crosses the border daily and I can board mixed VIA-Amtrak passenger trains right here in Toronto) don’t have high-speed trains; I think rather it’s that we’ve forgotten about rail travel at any speed. (And just as an aside, our own government hasn’t helped, cancelling many passenger routes in the early 90s.) But before we can convince governments and investors to put money into high-speed trains, such as France’s TGV and Japan’s Bullet Trains, we have to show them that there are enough people willing to travel by train to make it worth their while.
I’ll admit, I myself like trains. I’ve used them frequently, mostly to travel in VIA’s Windsor-Quebec corridor, and I find them much more comfortable and less of a hassle than air travel. Downtown-to-downtown service is a great feature, and oddly enough, when I add up the time it takes me to get from my home to the airport, check in, do the security thing, fly, and get from the airport into, say, Montreal, the train takes me about the same length of time as an aircraft does. I’m convinced rail can be a viable alternative to air; now the railways need to convince others too.
Well, San Jose airport is minutes from downtown SJ, but I don’t see all that much value in city center-to-city center transport in the US. I do a lot of business travel and it never entails that type of travel. Perhaps the US is more suburbanized than Europe. But I’ve done a lot of busness travel in Europe, too, it was rarely the city center travel that you describe.
Maybe it’s all those gov’t bureaucrats running around that makes European travel so different.
Well, that depends what you mean by “center”. I meant the part which is accessible with public transport systems.
My home or my work in Lyon are both not right at the center but only 10min from the railway station (using the metro). And in Paris I often need to go to the he ENST (telecom university), not at the center of Paris but 25min from the railway station. Airport -> ENST takes much longer.
On the other hand, when I visit my sister in law, then the railway station is as far away as the airport, she lives in the suburbs …
I think the layout of the cities is not the same in Europe and in the US.
I lived in the suburbs of Washington D.C. (College Park) for a while and without a car it was a pain in the ass. Since I’ve been there 2 x 2 months, buying a car seemed to much trouble for the short time. Well, living without a car was more trouble…
Eh? National has one of the quickest security checkpoints out of most of the airlines I’ve been to. They just throw your bag on the X-Ray machine (like they’ve always done) and check your ID to your boarding pass. There’s never much of a line.
The plane noise isn’t even really noticeable except right on the waterfront at the Sequoia or Watergate.
About 6 months ago I needed to go from DC to New York. I grabbed a shuttle for about $60 cheaper round trip than a round trip train ticket. And it got me there in about half the time as a train ticket. Assuming high speed rail between DC and NYC would take about 2 hours (about the same distance as Lyon to Paris) That’s about the total time it took me to leave my apartment, get to the airport, fly to NYC and to make it to where I was going in Queens. Not only that, the high speed rail would probably have cost MUCH more than my round trip plane ticket. So where is the benefit?
High speed rail is good for certain situations, such as last minute travel. But other than that, it would be more expensive than a plane trip and not that much faster.
High-speed rail will never happen in the US.
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While most people are curiously silent when their tax money is used for air service, they will scream about using tax money to subsidize rail service.
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There are significant portions of rail infrastructure that have not been maintained in years. It’s not just a matter of taking existing rail lines and using them. Big investment time.
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Because the trains travel fast, they will not be able to use excessively curved or steeply graded tracks, unless you want to run them slow, which sort of defeats the purpose. That means new tracks and new routes, and that means environmental impact reviews. Probably a good 10-15 years of them.
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The places where high-speed trains would have the highest usage also have the highest land cost. S. Florida, the East Coast, the West Coast, LA-Vegas, etc. More big investment time.
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The airline industry, airline unions, teamsters, etc. will fight tooth and nail against any such system. When I lived in Texas many years ago, there was a big push for an Austin/Dallas/Houston TGV system. Southwest Airlines led a huge lobbying effort against it. I don’t think they were ultimately responsible for the project’s shelving, but they certainly played a role in it.
I’m personally in favor of high-speed rail. I just don’t see it happening within my lifetime.
Last August I flew from Washington to Montreal (round trip) and they checked ALL passenger bags at least for 15 minutes. They openend all bags took out the stuff and checked everything to the slightest detail.
The guys were really friendly and all, but it was a pain in the ass.
And we were not aloud to use the toilet during the first 30 minutes of the flight and on the return flight during the last 30 minutes.
Flonks: That was an international fight, as I’m sure you know. We haven’t taken over Canada. Yet.
I didn’t know that there are less security checks for domestic flights. The 911 terrorists used domestic flights, so it doesn’t really make sense …
About Canada (off topic) I always thought that there are some arguments for the theory that Canada has already been taken over:
- Telephone system: you have the same country code
- The Ronald Reagan National Airport provides Canadian destinations
- When I bought my Canada travel guide it was in the “U.S.A” section at borders
How do you know that Canada isn’t subverting the USA?
Except for the british railroads which became a total mess (including more accidents, delays, higher prices)…since they have been privatized… 
. It happens that for some mysterious reason, private companies aren’t that interested in very-long term investments like modernizing a railway system which will cost a awful lot of money and which will turn profit only…in a very, very long time…And aren’t that interested in paying too much for modern safety equipment, either, as shown by a relatively recent and tragic accident.
Also, I would note that apar there are economical advantages for a country to have an efficient and well-develloped railway system. It has a lot of indirect benefits which wouldn’t come as a profit, hence would be of no interest for a private company. More or less like there’s an advantage in having a well-develloped road system, even if it wouldn’t be interesting for a private company to build one, since in most case it wouldn’t turn a profit (beside both require huge investments, and apart from the government, who would invest so much money for so limited and so long-term direct profits?) So, it makes sense that the governments are heavily involved in railway systems.
Apart from that, the fact that the US is a huge country, and more importantly, compared to Europe, with a low population density might make railways not necessecarily the best option for this country, apart in some specific cases or places.
Finally, the fact that american people are apparently so accustomed to use their cars or to fly when they go from one point to another would probably make even more difficult to have a comprehensive railway system rolling. Plus, I believe that Armtrack (sp?) hasn’t a very good reputation, and isn’t considered as a reliable transportation system (I heard that trains can commonly be hours late), so, the federal/state government or private company could have a hard time convincing people to ride trains.