It wasn’t me that put up that number. However, as I understand it, the current California HSR is now budgeted for $117 billion, and the distance is 238 miles for the currently proposed track between Bakersfield and Merced. That’s about $438 million per mile.
You are right that some of this is through mountains, and California is particularly insane about regulations and costs are out of control in that state because of it. I imagine running track through the flat prairies would be considerably cheaper.
But there will be lawsuits every step of the way, and you would likely have to invoke eminent domain many times and seize property to build a new national track system. You can’t run HSR on existing track without lowering the speed to existing train speeds, and if the HSR is electric you’ couldn’t domit at all.
And we are doing all this for what? Who is clamoring for trains, other than the lobbyists whispering into politician’s ears? is there an obvious need for such expensive infrastructure? Is the money better spent on trains which don’t help global warming at all, and actually make it worse for decades? Where are the bottlenecks in transportation that this will remove? How will diverting massive resources to this help the economy or the planet?
HSR won’t even create that many jobs, as nearly all the hardware and expertise will be outsourced to Europe and Asia.
Pittsburgh/DC is definitely one of those awkward edge cases. Meeting in the western burbs? I’ll fly. At Pitt or CMU? Maybe I’ll drive.
But very few regular business travelers are arriving at DCA 90 minutes early. That’s an amateur move that we beat out of the new hires quickly. And while PIT is a long way from the city, DCA is not.
I was curious myself and found the Texas Eagle runs from Chicago to San Antonio where three cars are tacked onto the Sunset Limited – New Orleans to Los Angeles. Elapsed time from Chicago to LA is 65 hours which I judged close enough to 69 and didn’t raise a fuss.
However the Southwest Chief runs a more direct route from Chicago to LA and takes only 46 hours. Unless you really want to see Arkansas and Texas more than Kansas and Colorado, you’re going to take the Chief. More likely someone who lives in those different intermediate towns the Eagle serves would use it to get to the west coast, not someone in Chicago.
It reminded me of when I wanted to fly round trip from Phoenix to San Jose and went to a website where airlines could offer a bid to fly with them. I went with the one that offered a direct, non-stop flight in 90 minutes for $110 rather than the one that wanted me to pay $650 to fly by way of Minneapolis with two stops and a change of plane each way in 18 hours.
I think your linked website is a bit broken. I see on Trainbuster a train from Chicago to LA that takes 4hr, 20m, which means it would run at nearly 500mph the whole way, no stops. I think they forgot to add in the days on rail. Wanderu clocks that trip at 19hr, 10m + one day = 43 hours 10 minutes.
I don’t see that as being materially different. Whether you are choosing 48 hours or 69 hours, both are of a completely different nature than a 3.5 hour flight.
If there were massive savings I could see some poorer people choosing that, bit there isn’t. So the only people likely to use it are people who like trains and train travel for its own sake. There aren’t nearly enough such people to make most trains either profitable or energy efficient.
My brother doesn’t care for flying and in college generally spent 26 hours on the Southwest Chief instead of 3 hours on Southwest. I used the Pennsylvanian some in college, as I didn’t have a car for three years, and frankly the overnight Pennsylvanian to Chicago (which no longer goes that far) or a trip to Philly on the same followed by the Acela Regional to BWI (though the timing never worked out to fly same day) wasn’t terrible. But I could never get myself to spend basically 48 hours (with layovers) to do something I could fly nonstop.
Frankly, at times I’d rather travel the Big Gray Dog if I wasn’t flying. At least then you’d probably get some amusing stories out of it.
Ordinarily coach is cheaper than air, faster than the bus and yeah, I prefer rail and being retired, can spare the time. The question is how direct are the two points. A couple years ago when I wanted to go to Corpus Christie I drove from Phoenix.
And if you see no difference between less than two days (46 hours) and nearly three (69) then I guess you can’t tell.
After more through on the OP’s contention, it has a fatal flaw. Car transport can only reach so high before alternate means, such as HSR is needed to allow car transportation to continue. Basically cars need trains, however trains don’t need cars. There is simply not enough roads that can be built to accommodate cars once population density reaches a certain level, and it gets to a tipping point that the more roads you built the more cars come to jam them up, and that land that the roads need becomes very expensive and in high demand. Now perhaps with a authoritarian government telling people who can own and drive a car, and where people can live we should be able to pull off a car only culture.
As opposed to car transit, train transit works opposite (to a point), more people using cars = slower transit time (in general), but with more people using trains travel time goes down both for train travel time and also for car travel time (as there will be less cars on the road as people select train travel). So again cars require trains, and a road system is helped by making trains fast and efficient so people consider that option as stay off the road, freeing space for the other cars and thus helping them on their trips. Making trains HSR will make train travel more attractive.
My former roommate was a salesman and travelled nationally for his job. He flew several times a week and I was often surprised at how close he would cut the times to arrive for a flight. But he was super-well practiced at it. That said, a few things:
He was relying on traffic being predictable. Usually it was but not always.
He had set himself up for expedited security screenings. There is a thing you can do to make your trip through security quicker. Most frequent travelers have that.
Because he traveled so much he had a gazillion miles accumulated on his airline of choice. That afforded him all sorts of extra perks including early boarding and not getting bumped if the plane was oversold.
For us travelling peons, arriving 90 minutes before the flight is not a bad idea (maybe 60 minutes). And by “arrive” I mean walking in the front door of the airport.
Kind of reminds me of the original Sim City where the solution to traffic woes was to put in 100% light rail. You still get complaints about wanting more roads but in the advice section of the instruction manual was “They just want to drive their hot rods around. Ignore them.”
Again, the main reason we cannot build high speed rail in America is that our civil court system is completely open to bad-faith actors gaming safety, labor, and environmental regulations, or the fact that you can file as many lawsuits as you want that don’t even invoke any real principle at all, to use courts as an open-ended block on anything they don’t want done. The people who don’t want rail built have plenty of money for lawyers to abuse this process. This is a problem that has repeatedly blocked rail projects over the past 20 years, and it must be solved before HSR becomes viable.
China’s solution is to be an authoritarian regime in which no one has any right to access the justice system at all beyond what the dictatorship allows and there are no meaningful labor safety, labor, or environmental regulations. This approach has many other moral and social costs and is not the way to solve the problem. It’s almost as if “but at least they make the trains run on time” as an apology for unfree societies has literally been a cliche for decades.
So, what’s stopping our existing airlines from taking the load off the highways, like we do now.
Also, except for urban freeways, we have a long ways to go before this is a systematic issue. Like probably doubling our population.
