It doesn’t have to be one or the other. We can move freight and people on trains if it makes sense to do so.
In a thread titled “American High Speed Rail is a Terrible Idea”, I thought we were.
Cite for the bolded part, please.
Well, the huge difference is how dynamic airfares are. I looked up a flight and was not happy with the price, so I checked another airline, but that was $30 more, so I went back to the first one and it was now $50 more than the second one. At least with Amtrak, ticket prices stay the same for days, weeks, months on end.
Actually, Amtrak practice airliner pricing with different prices for the same service on the same train, depending on how far ahead you’ve bought the ticket and some other mysterious factors. For example, I just checked a coach seat on the Coast Starlight from Los Angeles to Seattle.
Thursday, July 1, it’s $248
Thursday, July 8, it’s $126 with the note One left at this price.
Thursday, August 12 it’s $101 with no note.
Thursday, September 2 (another pre-holiday) it’s still $101
First, the airlines are suffering from the post 9/11 problem. If I have to show up two hours early instead of ten minutes early, go through the inconvenience and humiliation of TSA, and can’t carry some of my things that I could in a car, then that pushes the demand for car travel back up. Maybe that trip that in 1997 I would have flown, I decide to drive now.
But I just can’t visualize wanting a train except in the most limited of circumstances. They don’t go much faster than a car. It would have to be from my town straight to my destination. I still need a ride to the train station and then a ride from the destination train station to my hotel or office building. Anything a train could offer, why couldn’t an airplane offer it better? The TSA wait times at the airport seems to be the only benefit that would be skipped at a train station----unless they become more popular and a place for terrorist attacks, then we will have them there.
Maybe if parking at your destination was prohibitively expensive and it was just ridiculously too short for a plane ride, then that is the niche market I see for trains.
Right because the rail network famously must only transport one kind of thing.
There’s only Thomas the tank engine, and if we ask him to take passengers then all the coal must go by truck, causing a massive traffic jam; I think I’ve seen that episode.
Or perhaps what people are suggesting is a combination of increased utilization of existing routes and trains, more trains and more track?
This thread is about possibility, and practicality, of introducing high-speed passenger rail to parts of the U.S., which is much faster than a car.
But it doesn’t make sense in the US. High speed rail in Europe is a much smaller/denser foot print. In the US we have a center section that is very large and thinly populated. We call it flyover country because of the distances covered between major cities.
Right. I doubt very much that there would be much demand for full coast-to-coast trips on a high-speed rail system in the U.S. It would be faster and more convenient to fly. But I haven’t seen anybody seriously proposing a full, nation-spanning HSR, either.
I think it can make sense to have high-speed rail in certain parts of the U.S. We can build it in those areas where the population density makes it worthwhile.
Also, even if no one rides a high-speed train from one end of the line to the other, that doesn’t mean the system is a failure. The Acela runs from Boston to Washington, D.C. If I were going to make that trip, I’d probably fly. But I have taken the Acela from Boston to New York City. Someone else probably got on in NYC and rode to Philadelphia. Someone else got on in Philadelphia and went to Washington. It’s not about the end points, it’s about all the places you go through on the way.
I’m usually travelling the other direction, but, yeah, I’d love to take a speedy train to the Bay Area. And, with their superior public transportation, I wouldn’t need my car when I got there…for the most part.
For some distances, yes. For others, not so much.
Here in Alberta, special interests have been pushing an HSR line between Edmonton and Calgary. A distance of about 300 km. Advocates talk about 300km/h speeds, enabling business commuters to do day trips for meetings if they want.
Here’s the reality: An HSR is more likely to run at average speeds of 160-200 km/h. And it would have to stop in Red Deer. Cars go 110 km/h on the road between the two cities. So now we are talking about a difference of maybe 45 minutes to an hour.
But if I have to drive or catch a cab to the train station, park, get a ticket, get on board and wait for the train to leave, then on the other end I have to get a cab or rent a car to get to my final destination, I’d give just driving to my destination at least a 50/50 chance of being faster. Certainly the difference between the two would be small. And driving my car doesn’t require paying for two cabs plus a train ticket.
In Europe it’s different. I took a train from Salzberg to Munich, and it arrives at a station that also has underground trains for the city. So I just walked off one train onto another, and I was back at my hotel in 20 minutes. Those trains could have taken me within walking distance of pretty much any destination in the city. It was awesome. But it only works if there is supporting mass transit for the last mile problem.
For these reasons, HSR can work in places like that for distances as short as 200km. But in the giant North American cities with poor transit, I suspect you’d need at least 400-500km distances before HSR really beats a car by enough to warrant leaving the car home and cabbing it on the other end. And of course pricing matters. HSR is expensive. In Europe in some places HSR replaced older trains, but the ticket prices for HSR were much higher, causing poor people to lose access to trains at all. No one is going to take a train 200 km if it costs $100 for a ticket.
Then the problem becomes airplanes. If I have to leave my car at home anyway, If I’m going 500 km or more a plane is faster. So HSR in North America has a very tiny window of distances where it is competitive with cars on one end and airplanes on the other. A 1000 mile trip is probably 8 hours or so by HSR in the real world, vs maybe 2-3 hours by plane.
A few years ago, my wife and kid took a VIA passenger train from Vancouver to Edmonton. The line was dying, as It’s not very competitive against just about any other way of traveling, so VIA used to sell the ride as an ‘experience’. See the rockies from a train, that sort of thing. When the train pulled into the station I watched the passenger cars go by one by one, shut down and empty. The actual passengers were in the last couple of cars, which were maybe half full. I’d guess that it cost more in CO2 to haul those people than it would have if each passenger had driven a truck instead.
If you are going to guarantee that track won’t be given over to passenger trains, your project will get more difficult, Even i Europe HSR has to sometimes move on old track, slowing average speeds, because there was just no one to get new HSR track built in that area.
HSR would generally run on its own track, but Biden’s proposed Amtrack expansion would almost certainly share track with freight. Amtrack does that now. People complain because freight gets priority (as it should), but that can screw with Amtrack’s scheduling. That’s one of the reasons they want money - to build more dedicated track. And if that’s all they were doing - building new track for existing routes - I’d be okay with that. But the plan is to expand Amtrack all over thr country.
https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Table10_08_01312021.xlsx
You’ll have to read between the lines a bit. In that graph you’ll see that the big change to efficiency came from almost doubling the average distance per trip as well as carrying more cars per train. Trains take little energy at constant speed due to steel wheels on a steel track and low frontal area to mass. Starting and getting up to speed is what kills you. So doubling the length of the trip and minimizing starts and stops improves efficiency.
The diesel-electric locomotive is a pretty mature technology. So much so that the average locomotive in the U.S. is almost 30 years old.
The train I ride across the country has about 40 stops in a couple thousand miles, for an average of about 56 miles between. Some are a hundred miles apart, others less than 20. A lot of stopping for a furlong of double-deck steel. A few of those major stops are (scheduled for) in the middle of the night.
It is a chicken/egg thing. Get more people riding, you can put on two or three daily runs, meaning some of those stops could be alternated between runs, keeping the train moving for longer stretches (reducing travel time), and have runs the serve the major cities at more convenient hours.
In the end, rail passenger travel is less efficient because it has been marginalized. It could be viable, comfortable, practical and efficient in a supportive socio-economic climate.
Well a couple of answerrs to that:
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We have the socio-economic climate that we have. If trains don’t work efficiently within it, then they don’t. We aren’t going to remake people and society so we can make passenger trains more efficient. We also have the cities that we have, and they are never going to have European-style mass transit as it would be impossible. As I pointed out, Metro Edmonton is roughly 9500 square kilometers in size. Munich is 310, despite having 40% more people. The ratios are like that for many cities in North America. You have to work with what you have, not what you wish you had.
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If we are all driving electric cars in 20 years like we’re supposed to, trains cannot come close to competing in energy efficiency, The absolute best trains can do is around 500-600 BTU per passenger mile. An electric car can do 261 BTU per mile. Put four people in it, and you’re down to 65 BTU per passenger mile. Either way, trains can’t come close.
So ultimately we are going to engage in massive engineering projects that emit lots and lots of CO2 for 20 years or more before these things are even running, and by the time they are in operation they’re likely to be the least energy-efficient form of overland travel. And we’ll spend half a trillion dollars doing it (I say ‘we’ because the Canadian government is on board with this foolishness as well), which we could have spent mitigating warming or building nuclear, solar, wind and hydro capacity.
At best, if trains somehow did save a bit of energy over electric cars, the savings won’t start for decades and then the payback period of the construction CO2 will be more decades. Until then, it’s all negative in terms of global warming.
I thought we were supposed to be in a hurry? That we only have X years to fix the problem of climate change before we are all screwed. So how does it make any sense to engage in massive new engineering projects that are big consumers of steel, concrete and other energy intensive processes for a couple of decades? Under what logic does that make any sense if we are in a climate emergency?
And it is absolutely impossible to change it, in large part because what people like you think would be better is apposite to what people like me think would be better.
About fifteen years ago, there was a study of sorts that showed that a refrigerator uses less power than a PDA. This is wherein your argument fails. Passenger rail rolling stock has a yearly turnover rate in the hundreds, if that. Personal motor vehicle turnover is about three orders of magnitude greater than that. You cannot escape that energy cost when counting KJ/PM if you want your argument to not be dishonest. There is also, most likely, a large difference in the energy costs related to surface maintenance (tires on roads vs steel wheels on rails).
Consider the early days of passenger air travel. You could say the same about that and now look at it.
Early cities had mass transit till the rise of the automobile which dramatically transformed US society (move to the suburbs).
New transport methods can and have transformed how we live in the past.
“You and your family could travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas onboard a high-speed train,” Biden [said] at the plan’s unveiling.
possibly a bit heavy on the fantasy side.
Still, If we go section by section it’s not going to change much because of how spread out the country is. It was a total fail in California which was a perfect test bed. Consider it a lesson learned.
If train travel becomes as popular as air travel was prior to this pandemic, you might want to consider how China handles long rail and long bus trips: they have their equivalent of TSA screenings. The more popular the travel option is, the more likely it will be a target.
We have had CBP walkthroughs on the train. They were creepy.
Although reading the article, it’s still a very long time before construction starts.
But it’s definitely odd to see a private firm wanting to do this–while California piles up bigger and bigger cost overruns.