In Helsinki, you tap the tram/bus card as you get on. I agree that the idea it need take very long at all for train stops is antiquated. Or the idea that you’d need to faff about buying a ticket at the station - Sam can envision calling a robot taxi, but not booking a train ticket online?
That would ruin his argument.
Yes, online ticket booking totally changes the equation in favor of trains.
More silly nit-picking.
Which you’ve dome more than your share of.
Augured in.
Still has yet to sink, though.
(as long as people keep posting to it)
No, more like your omission of consideration of online booking for trains shows up your cherry-picking.
You added whole hours onto train journeys for it and your invented security theatre, so that’s quite a big nit.
North of the border, this may be of interest:
That’s not Canada’s first kick at the HSR cat. We had high speed rail in Canada in the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s - the UAC Turbotrain. Amtrack tried to make it work in the U.S. as well. It was a failure.
There have been other proposals for high speed rail since. Thankfully, we never built them.
But what’s the argument here? There have been plenty of successful HSR projects around the world – many here in China but not only authoritarian states. So, there is no law of physics that such projects must vastly overrun budgets and schedules and underdeliver on speed.
Is it, once again, American exceptionalism meaning “We can’t achieve things that many other countries can”?
Frankly, I would be afraid of some ignorant putz spreading rumors that high speed rail causes nose cancer, followed by another ignorant putz deciding to do something dangerous just to be an internet “hero”.
Well, if it is to be one of those fancy-ass maglev thingies, you know, those super strong magnets produce so much NMR radiation that getting within 200’ (61m) of one would be like spending an hour inside a medical scanning machine.
Biden’s daily DC to Wilmington trek costs at least 40 bucks one-way and only shaves off about 20 min assuming you live right by the train station, vs ~$20 (including tolls) to drive there, assuming NO car pooling is going on (and, granted, assuming free parking at your destination). When we can get those at comparable prices, even for a single person (no car pool), I’ll consider rail as a viable option.
I maybe go to DC once a year or so (I live a little south of Wilmington) with the family. It would be completely idiotic from a cost perspective to take the train.
China built its high speed rail link between Shanghai and Beijing (1,318 km) in three years.
California approved its HSR link in 2008, when it was projected to cost $33 billion, and would run between LA and San Fransisco (610 km), and be finished by 2018. As of now, the cost has ballooned to $117 billion, the length has been scaled down to Bakersfield to Merced, 171 miles. This first phase is not set to open before 2029, 21 years after the project was greenlit. And there will probably be more overruns and delays before then.
So why is it so difficult and expensive to build HSR in the U.S.?
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Regulations. Endless environmental and labor regulations tie everything up in red tape for long periods of time. After 11 years, they still have not completed the requisite environmental impact reports for phase 1. If Xi wants a train in China, no pesky health, safety or environmental regulations get in the way.
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Bureaucracy. It took four years for the California legislture to approve the first construction plan, after the project had already been greenlit. Nothing gets done at all without endless approvals, committee reports, oversight board demands, etc.
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Labor costs. The insistence on using union labor drives up both costs and delays. But even non-union labor in America is much more expensive. China can hire endless amounts of cheap labor, or use coerced labor if necessary.
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Property rights. If China wants to run a train where a village exists, they just tell the villagers to get out and raze the place. In America, you have to fight endless court battles or invoke eminent domain, which triggers further court battles.
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General political dysfunction. Projects get approved based on political whim rather than sound engineering. Multi-administration-spanning projects see their requirements and funding change repeatedly as each administration tries to put its own stamp on the project.
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Waste, fraud and abuse. These projects are pushed hard by special interests who then take advantage of the rain of billions of dollars to enrich themselves. Politicians give out contracts based on political support rather than engineering capability. Contract prices get padded. Everyone wants to wet their beaks.
The same is true in many other industries. For example, in 2015 China greenlit the construction of eight new nuclear reactors Three of them are already online, and four more are under constuction for an estimated cost of $10 billion, or 2.5 billion each. In the U.S., the NRC requires three years just to review an application, and a new plant could take more than 20 years before it comes online, largely due to regulatory oversight and constant lawfare from environmental groips with deep pockets.
That’s the main reason why no nuclear reactors had started construction in the U.S. between 1977 and 2013, and only two are under construction now. The capital costs of a multi-billion dollar project that takes 20 years to complete make it infeasible. For the same reason, without major regulatory reform high speed rail in the U.S. will always be an expensive boondoggle.
These are all valid points, but note that I said not only authoritarian states.
What I was saying is that if you want a clear example of how quickly high speed rail can be implemented in ideal circumstances, look to China. But if you want examples of how such projects will typically be implemented in democracies, you can look to Japan, France, Spain, Germany etc.Yes they may go over budget but not bungled as much as US HSR.
Fair enough. But Europe and Japan are very different than North America in a lot of ways. First, they are much more compact and have dense populations and are difficult to drive in, so they never had the sprawl and the car culture that North America has.
Most large cities in Europe and Japan has extensive public transit, so adding trains between cities can seamlessly fit into that system. When I was in Munich I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get pretty much anywhere in the city by train. We wanted to visit a friend who lived in a nice house in a residential area, and all we did was get on the train across from the hotel, transfer once, and the station we exited from was maybe three blocks from their place. That was about the experience we had going anywhere. And when we went from Munich to Salzberg it was just one more transfer.
But if you tried to do that here in Edmonton, it would be on average a six-block walk to a bus, a 5-15 minute wait for the bus, then a 15-30 minute bus ride to the LRT station. From there, another 15-30 minutes on the LRT, then if you aren’t near your destination another bus ride then a six-block walk to your destination. What would take 20-30 minutes by car is more like an hour and a half and a ton of hassle unless you and your destination are right on the LRT line. And that’s a small fraction of the population.
In Europe, HSR can be used for trips as short as 200km, because the travel overhead to get to and from it is low. In the U.S and Canada it would have to be a lot longer than that, because of the ‘last mile’ (or ten mile) problem we have in our sprawling ciries makes cars more useful for shorter trips or if you need a car at your destination - which in Europe and Japan you usually don’t.
For comparison, the Edmonton Metro area has about a million people and an area of 9,427 km². Munich has 1.4 million people and an area of 310 km. I think you can see the problem with an HSR trying to serve those spread-out people, all of whom are comfortable driving cars.
Edmonton is a very sprawling city, but any comparison between American and European cities will show similar patterns.
That’s why the demand side is a problem. As for costs, are there any non-authoritarian countries building HSR right now on new track? Not proposed, but actually under construction? France built its TGV a while ago. It also built out an entire nuclear power infrastructure for 80% of their power in around a decade. But as far as I know, they have also become snarled in regulations and red tape.
Between 1975 and 1980, France built 38 reactors, and they took about 5-6 years to complete. By the 80’s, average construction time had risen to 8 years, with some taking twelve years or more. The last reactor built in France went online in 1999. Since then, nuclear power has been snarled in red tape and politics.
In Canada, large infrastructure projects are incredibly hard to get done now because of all the competing interests that have a say. BC’s latest hydro project is years behind schedule and way over budget because of appeals by environmental groups, indigenous groups, etc.
All it takes is for someone to claim that there is a threatened species or critical groundwater or whatever where an HSR wants to go, and the entire project can grind to a halt until the dispute is settled in the courts. Then there’s NIMBYism, and political considerations.
You may approve or disapprove of our regulatory structure, but there is no question that it has made building new infrastructure very difficult in many western nations.
Also, it’s my belief that in general western governments have become very dysfunctional. Partisanship and the power of special interests are killing us.
That’s pretty much how every single European train I’ve been on has worked; you can get on to a car at the front or back, and you just leave your luggage up there, and go find a seat.
At some point, a conductor may come by and punch your ticket, but it’s not a 100% certainty.
The upshot of it is that they can get a LOT of people and luggage on and off the train very quickly- up and down the length of the platform at each stop.
If TSA gets their stupid claws into it, they’ll assuredly fuck it up and make it slow and frustrating.
I mean, that’s pretty much inevitable if train travel becomes a significant portion of the national transit. There is no functional difference from the TSA’s point of view, save that currently train travel is such a marginal travel mode that it’s not a significant risk.
I avoided this post for some time, because I have very strong opinions about HSR. However, where it becomes a problem is that I am liable to anger nearly everyone. The problem is that this shouldn’t be a political issue on its face, but has been turned into a tribal argument.
The Bad news for the left Wing: Sam_Stone here is overzealous, argumentative, and a bit excitable - and he’s right about all of the problems he describes. California’s HSR project is just… sad at this point, the product of politicians unable to back down from the cliff they put themselves on. Among other things this irks me because of the national tax money being shoveled into a vanity project. (And that’s among the nicer things I can say about it.) Far better systems could have been built in much better locations. However, more than that, HSR is something that’s only of value where the ridership supports it, and that is exactly the kind of fact Democrats studiously avoid, lest common sense intrude upon their schemes to spend public money on useless projects that will ultimately just create more snouts at the public trough, and likely with nothing to show for it.
However, for my Right-Wing friends, of which there cannot be many on this board, HSR is a perfectly fine idea. It just needs to be done well. We can do this in many areas, but have chosen not to because it’s unpleasant and involves tough choices, and frankly, the Right has as much to answer for there as the Left. Many people find flying inconvenient or it won’t work for shorter hops, and HSR could theoretically be a very useful part of our travel mix. Spending some public funds on the matter makes good sense as a matter of policy, again provided that we actually spend the money to proper effect. It’s hard to avoid some amount of public involvement in transportation, just because anything that crosses land, roads, and state borders will involve the government somewhere along the way. Highways, Canals, Railroads, and Interstates - all were built with national tax dollars.
What generally annoys me about the debate over rail in this country is that we have one of the most developed rail system - if not THE leading rail system - in the world. It’s just not used for passengers. People chose, and kept choosing, alternatives to rail and did so often that the rail companies finally just didn’t want to touch passenger. We can, and absolutely consider HSR in the future - but we need to always think about why that transition occurred and make sure we have a good reason to build it. That factor seems to just get lost in the debate.
Personally, I think that the Texas Central Railway (TCR) has the best chance at the moment of actually getting completed. They just signed a 16 billion dollar contract with Webuild to do the actual construction design and building of the railway. The plan is for it to be operating commercially by 2026.
I mean, I’ve flown from Dallas to Houston, and I’ve driven between the two. And I’ve taken high speed rail in Italy, France and Belgium, and I’m excited, provided TSA doesn’t screw it up. Being able to just hop on the train with a carry-on and be in Houston 90 minutes later is absolutely fantastic- you can’t really do it that fast if you fly, with all the boarding, security, deplaning, etc…
And I say “fair enough” too.
I’m not necessarily a proponent of HSR here; it will depend on a number of factors and will not be the best option for all situations.
I was just taking exception to some implying that some of the fuckups that have happened in the US are intrinsically a problem with HSR itself.