That seems weird to me. Would it be related to the fact you’re living close the airport, or that you would have to drive from your home to the train station anyway?
I’m wondering because here, there’s no way planes could compete with high-speed trains on so short distances, time-wise. When you add up the time needed to go to the airport, to check in, to fly, to go from the airport to the downtown again , the guy who took the train is waiting for you reading a paper and sipping a coffee.
But that could be because train stations are situated in the downtowns (perhaps they aren’t in the US) and that there’s a lot of convenient public transportation systems to go to the railway stations. If I was leaving home right now and decided to go to Lyon, I would be there within three-four hours, door to door, depending on how long I’d have to wait for the next scheduled train.
California has a High Speed Rail Authority and there will be a $10 billion bond measure in Nov 2004 for funding. Of course, the chance of the citizens of this great state opting to add $10 billion the current $30+ billion deficit is most likely quite low. However, I, personally, have been working on some of the initial environmental clearances for the project so it does currently have some funding.
The US already has a high speed rail (sorta). The Amtrack Acela train, although not as fast as it’s European or Japanese counterparts (150 mph vs 300mph) is essentially a high speed rail. The problem is that the trains share the same tracks as slower commuter rails like Metro North or NJ Transit and freight trains so they can’t really get up to full speed.
Personally, as someone who does not have a car, I would like to see some better regional rail service here in the NE. NYC, Philly, AC, Stamford, Hartford, Provdence and Boston are in that wierd middle distance where they’re too close to fly but far enough away to be a pain in the ass to drive to YET close enough that if you work in one city, you may frequently have to travel to the others. Some high speed rail would hit the spot.
clairobscur - AFAIK, most large cities (at least here in NE USA) have train stations downtown.
Little bit of both. I live about 10 minutes by Metro to the airport and 20 minutes from the train station. I was only going up for the weekend so I didn’t have to check baggage, and I picked up my ticket at the airport from the vending machine, so I didn’t have to wait in line.
The flight was only 50 minutes. Fortunately, there were no delays.
For where I was going in NYC, the airport (LaGuardia) is closer than the train station (Penn). So it all worked out. Even if I was going into Manhattan, the amount of time saved by going by train wouldn’t have been enough to justify spending the extra $60 on a train ticket.
To give you europeans an idea of how screwed up the passenger train system in the US is: Private companies used to run both passenger and freight systems. When the government took over passenger service and created Amtrack the private companies kept the tracks and freight service. They got the government to agree that passenger trains would not inconvience their businesses. And so freight trains have priority, and passenger trains must wait on sidings if there is a scheduling conflict. Nevermind that it will add hours for every passenger on a trip between Seattle and San Francisco, the coal cars must get through! Nothing but the freshest coal will do.
An important difference between a government-run rail system versus a government-run road system is that the road system, as it currently exists, provides a huge net economic gain for the country at large. If we agree that neither a private highway system nor a railroad system could turn a profit (as I believe neither could), then the question becomes what do we have to gain by maintaining government control of each? Because of the way our nation is laid out, having a huge and extensive road system is a necessity - and an expensive one, no doubt. But while the government funnels billions into maintaining these roads, I would wager the ROI on these billions is huge.
What could the government gain by creating a huge, federally funded rail system? Well, economically speaking, nothing. It would be a huge financial loss. Of course, there may also be non-economic gains to be had, but IMO, these gains don’t justify the financial loss a rail system would incur.
Really, what we have now makes the most people the happiest. If you want to travel within a couple hundred miles, go by car. Farther than that, go by plane. No car, and can’t afford a plane? Go by bus. It’s slow, but it’ll get you there. And the money we save by not having a ludicrously expensive national mass-transit system goes into our pockets. Works for me.
Jeff
I think the OP meant a “true” high speed train. There’s a big difference between conventional railway tracks and dedicated high-speed tracks. High speed tracks have no level crossings, no sharp turns and no shared traffic. They are also extremely safe - there hasn’t been a single fatal accident on the TGV or the Japanese bullet trains on dedicated tracks.
By the way the European and Japanese high-speed trians run at 300 km/h, not 300 mph, at least for scheduled trips. I believe 500 km/h has been achieved on test runs.
As for economic benefits, it will contribute to decreasing reliance on fossi fuels. It will also decrease the load on airliners and freeways. And they always say a fast, efficient transport system will “stimulate the economy”…
Australia’s got a reasonably run rail system. It doesn’t have any high speed trains (although there is a proposal for one floating around), but we still manage to run a dedicated, state-owned passenger rail system. And we’re much worse off than America in terms of running it - we have a country similar in size to the 48 states, but less than 20 million people to provide the tax dollars for it. Our cities are spread out, and there are a few big ones and the rest are really quite small, meaning that we have to even run services from (say) Sydney to Broken Hill (a town on the western border of NSW).
The US would have things easy in contrast. There are many majr cities spread reasonably close across the continent, and 280 million people to pay for it rather than 20 million.
Two factors conspire to doom high-speed passenger trains in the USA:
(1) WE have the largest, most efficient train system in the world! (Yes, that is true). However, it is designed to carry FREIGHT, not people…and 60 MPH freight trains and 180 MPH HS passenger trains don’t mix!
(2) The huge subsidies from the Fedral govt. (for highways and airports) mean that rail will never be adequately funded.
Actually , we should not worry too much…the day is fast approaching when most of us will have no need to commute to work…as A.C. Clarke wrote (some 40 yeras ago) “don’t commute-communicate!”
One last comment…around 30 years ago, a RIP professor of mechanical engineering had plans for trains that would travel in evacuated tubes (like pneumatic capsules in stores)…such trains could travel at Mach 1, and make coast-to-coast travel viable on trains. Of course, the cost would be astronomical!
There’s an interesting difference in how passenger rail and airlines are supported by the U.S. government.
For rail travel, the carrier (Amtrak) is funded by the federal government and it operates on infrastructure owned by private companies (freight railroads). The situation is exactly reversed for airlines. The infrastructure (airports and all phases of air traffic control) are provided by the government and private companies offer the service.
I think the airlines have flourished because their system makes more sense and plays to the strengths of government and private industry. The government takes on the long-term planning and can afford the massive investment needed to build airports. Private companies handle the day-to-day operations that can benefit from competition and innovation. The road network is the same way, private users (individuals and companies) on a public infrastructure, and has also been a success.
Another stumbling block to high-speed passenger rail is that most (all?) of the systems in the rest of the world use electric power, and most rail lines in the U.S. aren’t equiped for that. It took years to get the Acela service up and running for that reason. Amtrak trains from Boston to New York used to change locomotives (from diesel to electric) at New Haven, Connecticut. That added fifteen minutes to the trip, as if it wasn’t slow enough already. I used to live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and took the train to Philadelphia a couple of times. There were overhead wires on that track, but they hadn’t been used for years and I heard at least one modernization plan to get rid of them (and it may have happened by now); a step backwards in my opinion.
Actually railways can have a lot of economic advantages, and being connected to the railway system, and especially to a high-speed train system can boost the economical development of a region. That was the deciding factor here in deciding to build a high-speed line toward eastern France, which will most certainly have much less traffic than the lines headed to northern and southern France.
But it vastly depends on the local circumstances. Building a train line might or might not be more economically wise (I mean including all the indirect benefits…it will quite never turn a significant direct profit, except for freight, and even then, it’s assuming that you don’t have to build the railtracks from scratch. But that would be true also for roads).
By the way, trains have an added advantage when compared to a plane. They can stop on their way, hence your train line connecting two major cities will also connect minor towns in-between, with a short stop in them (not necessarily for all trains), adding very little time to the overall duration of the trip (or its cost), something which is impossible to achieve with planes. So an extensive railway system will provide to much more people a quick and convenient transportation. If you’re living in Marseilles and intend to go to Paris, without a train system, you can still fly. If you’re living in a little town somewhere in between, without trains, you’re just out of luck.
Anyway, I love trains, to the extent that I frequently chose longer and more convoluted routes when I want to go for one place to another just in order to enjoy the trip and watch the scenery. Given the choice between a high-speed train and a regular one taking twice as much time, I will pick the latter on occasions. I’ve some sort of romantic and visceral attraction to trains. Some people can’t enter in an airport without feeling the desire to board some plane and going somewhere, anywhere…I feel the same when I enter a train station.
One thing nobody has yet mentioned on this thread: What would it cost, per track-mile, to build high-speed rail in the United States?
For comparison, according to this site http://www.publicpurpose.com/freeway1.htm, construction of the Interstate Highway System from 1958 through 1995 cost a total of $329 billion (in 1996 dollars; in 1957 dollars, $58.5 billion). That’s to build a total of 42,700 miles of highway, so the average cost (in 1996 dollars) would be $7.7 million per mile.
Would building high-speed rail cost more or less than that per track-mile? Any of you Europeans know?
American cities are too spread-out for this to work, and the proposed Florida system in the OP is the perfect example.
I live in metro Orlando, but it would take me nearly half an hour to get downtown. Allowing time to park and some cushion so I don’t miss my train, you’re looking at an hour before I get. Assuming it is a bullet-train type thing, I could be in Tampa in half an hour … I then get out and 1) someone meets me and we drive for 15-30 minutes to get to his place 2) I take a cab ride.
Either way, the price won’t be less or much less than driving (even if gas was $2 a gallon) and the minimal time savings is not worth giving up the flexibility of coming and going on my own schedule. It looks a little better for longer trips like Miami, but for really long trips, you’ll fly.
High-speed rail works with 1) people living close to the city center 2) effective door-to-station mass transit and 3) cities that are close-but-not too close together.
I don’t see how points 1 and 2 are important for an inter-city high-speed rail system, which is what this thread is about. Right now travelling 200 to 500 miles in the US is inconvenient. If you take an airliner you have to put up with security searches, weather delays and all the inconvenience of buying a reasonably priced ticket. Driving several hours is neither fun nor safe. A properly maintained high-speed railway will be perfectly safe, virtually immune to weather delays (weather delay on the Japanese bullet train is literally front page news) and fast. A large parking lot at the train station can take the place of door-to-station mass transit.
But it is also FAR more expensive (except for extreme last minute). The airlines aren’t really that inconvenient at all - security searches amount to walking through a metal detector and having your carry-on x-rayed. Sometimes a random search, which takes 2 minutes. You can get your tickets at a machines, so you don’t have to wait in line. I really just fail to see the need for spending on a high-speed rail system. The system we have in place now with normal low-speed rail, highways and airlines is really pretty good.
I quickly searched a figure and here’s the first one I found (i won’t swear it’s representative) : the estimated cost for a new 140 kilometers long high-speed line is 1.36 billions euros. That’s roughly 10 millions euros/kilometer. I let you convert it in dollars/mile.
But I’m not sure it makes sense to compare costs this way, since we’re comparing apples and oranges. A high speed train line doesn’t serve exactly the same pupose. Also, you would have to compare how many people will be transported each day on your high-speed train/will drive on your highway, you’d have to take into account the maintenance cost, the cost of the trains themselves (and possibly the cost of the cars using the highway, when I think about it), etc…And of course various other costs : for instance the time spared by riding a high-speed train rather than driving, possibly the environmental cost, the cost of the elecricity/ gas, etc…
I’m not sure how one could actually make an estimate of the relative cost-efficiency ratio of a high speed train line compared to a highway (though there are certainly specialists who know how to make this sort of thing…I’m just not going to even try to figure out what you should take into account for such a comparison).
There have been great strides in developing high-speed trains, but planes are still much faster. Proponents argue that by the time you drive out of town to the airport, fly, and then drive into the city that you’re visiting, that the total time for the journey would be comparable on a high-speed train.
But that argument relies on the idea that it’s easy to get to the train station in your hometown. In some cities that’s still true. I think people living in lower Manhattan would find it much easier to get to Penn Station than to LaGuardia airport. Boston still has a thriving downtown population, and getting to South Station on the T is a piece of cake. But those seem to be the exception. In cities with few actual downtown residents, it may be easier for most people to get to a suburban airport than a downtown train station. Land is very expensive in city centers, which makes a large parking garage a pricey option. And even with ample parking, traffic congestion may make driving to the station impracticle.
High-speed rail may still make sense in some cases, it’s just important to know what those cases are.
(Boston’s an exception in other ways, too. Logan Airport is just across the harbor, and it’s pretty convenient as airports go. But they’ve also built a new train station (with parking) at Rte. 128 (that’s the ring highway around Boston, about ten miles from the city). From where I live, it’s much easier to get to the suburban train station than the downtown airport.)
