Sam Stone has a point, though. Sure, everything is vulnerable to attack in some way or other. But a high-speed train spanning a vast expanse from Chicago to LA is uniquely vulnerable. The ease with which such a train can be damaged (just throw a heavy object onto the tracks) is much more than with attacking many other things, and the damage which can be inflicted (a train derailing at 250mph could be fatal to almost everyone inside) is also much greater - and also the remoteness of much of the terrain, making it hard to guard. In short, it’s a very favorable mayhem-to-effort-expended ratio for terrorists.
Such dangers would exist with any HSR, such as Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington. But at least in that corridor, the economics of an HSR make it worth it.
It’s hard to do it now, because every car on the road is under independent control. If you’ve got hundreds of thousands of cars that are being driven by networked software, then it only takes one hacker to sabotage everyone of those cars at once - which has the potential to be exponentially more fatal than any train derailment.
Who said anything about them being all networked? And if they were, how do you know the network wouldn’t be designed to be fault tolerant?
In any event, talking about hacking future car networks in a thread about HSR still sounds like a gish gallup. You know damned well that any ‘network hack’ argument against a fctional car network would easily apply to a future fictional train control system. It’s a bullshit argument.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not necessarily advocating for HSR nationwide; I’m more interested in pointing out what I see as fallacies in your arguments.
Maybe, not necessarily. The airline network includes both non-stop and multi-stop flights between the coasts, at varying pricepoints and with various routings. EVERY train need not stop at EVERY city, so no, I don’t agree that we have to allow 4+ hours for every trip.
Amtrak already has security protocols, and none of them involve standing for hours in security theater.
More than that, the airliner shot down over Ukraine showed that planes also have threats for their entire flight, if somebody really wants it down. For that matter, as airliners are increasingly software-controlled and network-connected, somebody has probably thought about a hack to take control of a plane in the sky (cf the Boeing Uninterruptible Autopilot).
The road system is a heck of a lot more fragile than you imagine. While the damage can be routed around, it still costs money to do so. The I35W bridge being out for a year, e.g., is estimated to have cost $60-100 million plus in economic costs to businesses because they had to reroute, not counting the costs of the cleanup, rebuilding, construction on alternate routes, etc., and that was in a major metro area where they HAD a nearby alternate route they could fairly quickly convert into a controlled access highway. It’s rather like the recent shutdown of the Suez Canal; sure, traffic could be and was rerouted around damage, but a trip around the Cape of Good Hope is not free. Similarly (and depending on the technology chosen), high-speed trains may be able to run at slower speeds on other tracks, routing around the damage at some cost to transit times and expenses.
Except, of course, that there are bound to be orders of magnitude more cars than trains. No, nobody’s claiming that networked train systems are somehow invulnerable to hacking, but obviously any hypothetical vulnerabilities or “fault tolerance” in networks apply to both modes.
Same. I don’t think that anybody here has been seriously advocating for nationwide HSR in the US as a practical strategy given foreseeable demographic and technological constraints. But even against that straw opponent, Sam has been making some very unconvincing arguments as well as some reasonable ones.
How do you summon one of these cars if they’re not attached to a network?
“Designed to be fault tolerant?” Sure. “Actually fault tolerant,” is a different thing - and anyway, we’re talking about people deliberately circumventing safety measures, which is a different kettle of fish.
You’re the one who introduced “vulnerability to terrorism” as a factor in considering transit options. If it’s a bullshit argument against autonomous cars, then it’s an equally bullshit argument against high speed rail.
Come on, you are the Unregulated Capitalism Advocate here. We know very well that system design is minimalist and only responds to revealed flaws. This is simply not going to change, and the limitations on possible security mean that it most likely cannot change. The network and software would require significant flexibility, which by its nature incurs vulnerability.
Another thing to consider is that the current state of on-demand transportation is taking a heavy toll on the areas it is serving. This is another failure of unrestrained capitalism. Taxi service is expensive because it needs to be, and if you try to sidestep the restrictions in the name of affordable convenience, you end up with a mess.
Replacing mass transit with ultra-convenient robocars is a recipe for making things worse, not better. HSR (and normal-speed rail) need to be in the mix. If we do not start working on it now, it will likely not be doable when we actually want/need it.
Again, I’m not talking about networked cars, and never have. Even my example of automated cars didn’t assume any networking. It’s a strawman. Nationwide HSR is just as unreasonable if we never develop cars more sophisticated than what we have now. Again, the whole sidetrack about automated cars was just an example of how trends are working against train transportation.
And if no one is advocating nationwide HSR, what are we debating? I’ve already said repeatedly that HSR could make sense in some high density corridors.
But many of the comments I’ve been responding to are specifically about coast-to-coast HSR. The entire debate with Robot_Arm, for example. And others don’t make it clear that they are only talking about regional trains, so I have to respond anyway.
Nobody seems to want to go near the more important points and are spending their time and mine ‘debating’ increasingly irrelevant and pedantic stuff.
I just read the link. I had no idea that was numbers for the whole planet over 47 years, with the majority happening in South Asia. Next biggest Western Europe. America isn’t even mentioned. That is a supremely lame argument against rail in the USA.
Again, this is a sidetrack. And bringing Capitalism into the mix is a complete hijack. We all know you hate Capitalism.
So I guess it’s your opinion that no one in the private sector ever makes fault tolerant software, huh? That’s news to me, and I’ve spent a career in industrial software development, where you might be surprised to learn that fault tolerance is actually a thing. In engineering you learn that in systems with unknown unknowns you will never find all the bugs, so the next best thing is to make the system fault tolerant. When you are dealing with industrial machines you work with fault tolerant designs all the time.
At the simplest level, what do you think an exception handler is? Or a failover switch? Or a Cyclic Redundancy Check? Or transaction handling? Internet routing is fault tolerant, as is spread spectrum wireless communication.
Simple fault tolerance with networked cars could be as simple as reverting to ‘flocking’ rules where if cars lose their connections or an integrity flag is set they simply start slowing down while maintaining equal distance between themselves and other cars, until everyone has stopped.
But since we are talking about a future hypothetical which has nothing to do with the debate, I don’t really care. If you want to open a thread about how Capitalism doesn’t allow for fault tolerant software, knock yourself out.
Well what do expect? There was room for a fun discussion, I thought, but you use stuff like domestic terrorism in South Asia to scare people off rail in America (but also one foiled attempt in Canada!) What’s the damn point?
Are we talking to each other in this thread, or past each other?
I don’t think anyone here in this thread is advocating for there to be no HSR in America, nor do I see anyone advocating for coast-to-coast HSR (unless I missed it.)
So then we’re actually largely on the same page. Sam Stone is saying that local regional HSRs may make sense but coast-to-coast does not.