To summarize the article: someone was awarded a contract for $16billion towards a $20 billion project with no permits or right-of-way. There’s no mention of environmental studies or the upgrade in the power grid needed for the tsunami of electric cars that will be entering the market.
It could happen.
It should be noted that the screenings on HSR and long-distance buses in China take about 1 minute IME; you barely break stride. There’s no reason it should be slower than getting on the New York subway, and it isn’t.
Now, the USA isn’t China, and HSR could be a tempting terrorist target, and so screenings might ultimately be slower. In fact, I would say that is likely.
But in the context of this thread, it’s only important whether the time you need to be at the station waiting for departure becomes comparable to flying, and this is unlikely. The delays at the airport are largely due to how slow checking in baggage is (for the traveller, and for all the staff involved) and all the just-in-time stuff of which gate the plane is going to be at, and exactly when it will be ready.
Yes, I have of course experienced airport security check queues that took an hour or more, including in China, but there is no intrinsic reason why it needs to be that slow; I’ve also breezed through in less than a minute with adequate staff and scanners. There’s no intrinsic reason why the security check for HSR needs to be slow.
HSR in the US continues to be a fantasy of public officials and Americans that have traveled overseas to countries that have successfully achieved it.
It ain’t gonna happen here, primarily due to property rights of individuals in the US compared to other countries, and our court system. For HSR to work properly, you need very long straight lines, without turns. As property is purchased, land owners realize how valuable their tracks of land is in the pathway. Their value of that land goes up, and then the battle begins. Courts in the US have consistently sided with property owners, and such actions have been tied up in courts for decades, making the investment in HSR difficult.
Note tickets were estimated to cost $60 each way, so this comes up to $30,000/year for someone commuting twice a day for 5 days a week.
The Brightline project in Florida, running from Miami to (eventually) Orlando will get up to reasonably high speeds. It is not quite high-speed rail - probably due to the urban environment along the coast, plus I’m not sure the distances between stops will allow for it. It’s being built in a clever and efficient manner, however, using some of the latest construction techniques developed in Japan or China.
To me, a lot of the proposals for high-speed rail remind me of the boondoggle we have here in Albuquerque regarding bus rapid transit. The idea is great: specialized buses, stations, reliable arrival/departure times due to dedicated lanes and the ability to jump stop lights, and so on. I was in Guilderland when they built a system on NY 5 running from downtown Albany through Colonie to downtown Schenectady. Now, I only ever used it a couple times because where I lived meant an inconvenient connection of several miles to get to the system, but once the construction was done it was there without being in the way.
Not so in Albuquerque. Theoretically Albuquerque is fairly compact (under 600,000 people in 200 square miles, though the metro area of a million is a fair bit bigger), but the legacy of building four and six lane roads on a half-mile grid means a lot of spread even with the geographical and political constraints. In any case, the road that has historically been best served by bus is Central (old Route 66), which has the southern edge of the state fairgrounds, the southern edge of the university, the older “eclectic” shopping and dining area, the southern edge of Old Town, and downtown all on it. So, great, exactly the kind of building that would be great to serve by bus.
The problem was that getting to Central by bus is a nightmare. The routes to get to that one street simply aren’t there. Even if service exists, it’s unlikely to be available when someone might actually want it. But fixing that is not what got proposed and eventually built. What got built is the idiocy known as ART. After years of protests from people and businesses on Central, what finally got forced through was a system that removed a lane of traffic each way on the road as the buses now run in the left lane with central stations. Stations that were built wrong in several instances and had to be fixed. The left lane design mean that you can no longer easily make a left; you have to drive past your destination to the next light, make a U-turn, then drive back to where you want to go. What were supposed to be fancy electric buses were never delivered by the manufacturer, so the city is back to using traditional combustion. For quite a while the entire system was sitting idle; the lanes not being used by buses because there were no buses yet still unavailable as a lane of traffic.
ART has not fixed anything regarding public transit in Albuquerque. It was an unneeded addition to what was already the best ridden route in the system, made traffic on Central worse, cost the city lots of money (though a fair bit came from the Feds), and is considered the worst legacy of a bad mayor. A lot of high speed rail proposals seem similar. “If we spend all this time and money constructing this thing, people will use it.” But without considering the last-mile problem.
Of course, New Mexico also has the Rail Runner. Again, great in theory. Connect Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and a few other small cities and pueblos both in-between and further south (that mostly get used as bedroom communities these days) via rail using old BNSF right of way that the company didn’t want anymore. And people do use it; mostly those who live in Albuquerque and work for the state in Santa Fe and find that driving to one of the stations and taking the train makes more sense for them than driving up and down I-25 with all the traffic every day. Heck, I’ve considered it a few times when wanting to go to Santa Fe for the plaza and not having to deal with traffic and finding parking. Not even counting gas, the price is so cheap that I’ve paid more in parking than I would for a ticket. But most people still don’t use it; as attested to by the lines and lines of people going up and down I-25 every single day.
I tend to think that if Southwest is SO vociferously against it, there must be some merit in the idea that a Houston/Dallas high speed rail line is viable.
Beyond that, I think that competition would be good; high speed rail would make the airlines doing that leg change some things- deplane faster, get there faster, or something.
The single thing that would completely wreck HSR in Texas would be if it gets into TSA’s fell clutch and people have to wait in long lines and all the other bullshit like flying. The whole value proposition is basically that you’d get there in the same amount of time from end to end because you’d save a lot of time avoiding all the flight-related bullshit. I mean, you’d have the trip in 90 minutes end to end, which is about the same as a flight, because you have all the TSA nonsense on the takeoff end, and all the deplaning time on the landing end.
If you have to pay the same amount, go through the same TSA bullshit, AND it takes 90 minutes vs. 45 in transit, what’s the advantage?
That is certainly true.
One thing to bear in mind: Places with long running HSR systems, e.g, Japan, France, don’t have any of that apparatus for their trains. They do have it in their airports, of course. So one doesn’t imply the other.
Oh, I’m aware! I’m a big fan of high speed rail- I’ve traveled it in Italy, France and between Belgium and the Netherlands.
The big advantage to me is that it seems to hit the sweet spot between being fast, being cheap and having minimal hassle. Flying is not cheap and has a lot of hassle, but it’s the fastest. Driving is slow, the cheapest, and has moderate hassle (in large part because of the time frame). HSR has about no hassle, is very fast, and is comparable in price to flying.
When I rode the Shinkansen there was bag scanning and walking through a metal detector before going to the general boarding area, but it went quite quickly.
Another nice thing about rail travel is passengers walk straight to their car to board, vs a long queue to board a plane through a single entrance. It’s over in minutes and the doors close.
To some extent it’s subjective how much hassle each has. For example, I really hate long distance driving. Anything over an hour and I start wondering if I really want to go. OTOH I find the security in airports annoying, but not oppressive.
Hence I opt for flying (or train, if available) on much shorter routes than many other people.
Right, to me, rail is a moderate hassle, in between flying and driving. It has fewer delays/complete cancellations in my limited experience compared to flying, with less intrusive security, larger baggage allotments, and in many places a slightly more granular destination choice, but with driving all of that is zero, with the exception of unexpected traffic delays, but that’s offset by having to conform to the train’s schedule.
Do you have a cite that actually says what you claim it does, without “reading between the lines”, and doesn’t require a license agreement?
I do not know that it is cheap. I took the Eurostar from London to Paris and it cost the same as a flight between the two.
It also took about the same amount of time all things considered.
But the train was MUCH more relaxing and more fun. The trains go from city-center to city-center. A HUGE benefit over air travel which requires an expensive and long taxi ride or a really long commuter train. Add in security hassles, flight cancellations, over-booked planes, cramped seating and so on and the train starts looking really nice.
To me, cars are good for about 120 miles (give or take). Trains are good for 150 - 400 miles (give or take) and planes for anything over 400 miles.
Those numbers are loosey-goosey but get the idea across. YMMV
I guess this is where some differences of opinion and comfort come into play. Let’s take Pittsburgh to D.C. About 250 miles. A 4 hour drive. Probably (guessing) a 1 hour plane ride. Suppose we invested billions and built a HSR that averaged 125mph and it was a 2 hour train ride.
First, most people don’t live in the city center. I’m going to have to have my wife drive me, take a cab or an Uber and probably take an hour each way to get to the train station. There’s 4 hours right there. (2 hours +1 +1). And I don’t have a car at the end or back so there is more Ubers and public transports.
Even if I get to the airport 2 hours early as required, that is now five hours (1 hour to airport+2 hours wait+1 hour flight+1 hour from airport). It’s cheaper but one hour more.
If I drive, I leave straight from my house and hit the interstate. Four hours, equal to the train, cheaper, and I have my car at the other end. Plus, hey, didn’t I want to stop in Shanksville and see the Flight 93 Memorial? I can do that. I wanted to stop in Breezewood and hit the sports merchandise store so I can buy a Steelers jersey so they can disappoint me again. That looks like a nice diner over there, so I’ll stop.
I guess my point is that even for me, the 250 mile mark doesn’t make me want to take a train, and once we get much further than that, the cost and the time starts to favor a plane. A very narrow distance, if any, where a train might be something that a lot of people want, your opinion notwithstanding.
1 hour plane ride but you need to be at the airport 90 minutes before your flight and you need to commute to the airport which is probably an hour plus cost of the taxi or parking and then the same on the other side.
Your 1 hour plane ride has become a 4.5 hour adventure. And that assumes no problems.
And arguing a remote airport versus city center makes no sense. City center drop-off is far more desirable. It’s not even close.
The point still remains that a train in a big North American city has much less utility than one would in a densely packed European city with a good underground system.
Here in Edmonton, I’d guess that less than 20% of people are within walking or easy mass transit distance from the city center. For everyone else, it’s at least a cab ride or at least 45 minutes on public transit. So even if the train station was in the city center, for 80% of thr people it’s 1.5 hours just to get to/from the train station.
The HSR to Calgary has the same problem at the destination. Unless you are one of the few who needs to go somewhere right near the train station, it’s cab or transit time on the other end. And it you want to be there at least 15 minutes before the train leaves, we’ve already got 2 hours wasted just getting to/from the train station on each end of the destination.
A car drive to Calgary takes about 3 hours. If the train goes 200 kph, the car beats the train system by half an hour. And you have your car at your destination. HSR makes no sense, but itgets pushed here every year. There is relentless pressure from special interests to build the damned thing. Trains are a crony capitalist’s dream.
In a European city the calculus is much different. I can get on the underground near my house, get dropped right at the train station, and be on a train out of town in maybe 20 mins or half an hour - as fast as it would take to drive out of town. Then when I get to my destination city, it likely has a local train I can take from the station to my final destination.
People who envy the Euro train system and think we should build something like it here just haven’t grappled with the difference in scale. Again, Munich is 310 sq. Km. Edmonton is 9500. Other North American cities have similar population densities as Edmonton. It simply isn’t feasible to have the kind of mass transit here that they do in densely packed European cities, most of which are located within train distance of each other.
And again, to support the amount of passenger rail they have in Europe they’ve pushed a lot of freight onto the roads, which is a terrible tradeoff.
Somehow the argument that HSR does not make sense because America is so spread out sounds bass-ackwards.
Why? What do you mean?
If people have to go longer distances, they would want to cover them quickly. The logic of using aircraft for that is offset by the energy cost of flight, which is starting to become an issue. Some form of rail may ultimately prove to be the practical solution to those distances when the cost of flying becomes more than we can bear.