California gives up High Speed Rail project, why is the US a failure and laughing stock?

In My Humble Opinion
181

Nowhere in particular! I’m curious about how public opinion is measured in a country that (as far as I know) does not have opinion polling in any meaningful way, and where government is not held in check by people who can a) have a say on a bond act etc. and if all else fails b) vote the rascals out. I wondered how you were measuring the overall public sentiment under those circumstances.

I also ask because I have a sister-in-law who is Chinese and spent the first fifty years of her life in China, and she’s a big proponent of high-speed rail. On the other hand, she’s exactly the sort of person who WOULD be a fan. In China, she was an urbanite with money and no kids; she had the opportunity and the means to travel, and sometimes the need to do so, and HSR worked well for her.

From her perspective, whatever government spent on HSR was a Good Thing. The thinking might be very different for someone who lives in a smaller community or a rural area, or can’t afford to travel, or has too many family or work responsibilities to do it more than occasionally.

The number of passenger trips is certainly interesting. On the other hand, people often avail themselves of policies they don’t necessarily like, simply because they’re there or because “the system” has made it easy to use. I know a couple of libertarians who object to spending government money on airports, for instance, but happily jet all over the map.

And if I were visiting a country where HSR did exist (and didn;t cost too much to ride), I’d avail myself of it because it’s likely the best way to get from City A to City B for certain trips, even though I have concerns about whether it’s right for my area. So I’m not sure what the figure proves. I do appreciate your providing it, though.

I live in NY State between Albany and NYC, and I think sometimes about whether I would support HSR in my part of the world (I don’t count Acela). The reality is that HSR between NYC and Albany, or between NYC and Montreal–they probably would not stop in my smaller city. In that case, it’s pretty useless to me. Yeah, if I got to NYC I could get via HSR (I’m assuming) to Philadelphia or DC, but that’s less than direct, and I don’t have that many occasions to go there, and driving really isn’t bad–and HSR isn’t going to replace anybody’s car anyway.

So the benefits are going to accrue less to people in my position than to urbanites, with money, with the time and opportunity and possibly the need to travel. And maybe I’m not going to be so happy to have my money flowing (what seems like) upward to benefit people who aren’t me. Especially when the price tag is as huge as it seems to be.

Selfish? Yeah, maybe. But I gladly pay for the roads because I use roads and so do freight carriers and so might the military, and I don’t have a big problem with paying for airports even though I hardly ever fly, because of the goods that are carried on planes. I’m fine with supporting mass transit, because it’s environmentally a good idea and because it’s a real lifeline for a lot of people, even though (again) I hardly ever use it.

HSR seems different. Maybe the environmental benefit is greater than I know.

But there’s no question that I’d have to be sold on it, in a way I don’t have to be sold on these other things, and I imagine the same is true of a lot of Americans, though of course I don’t know for sure. Now, if the theoretical high speed rail between Albany and NYC DID stop in my community, I might have a different perspective…

Thanks again for the answer.

182

Oh my god you’re right, thank god we’re avoiding the nightmare of mass destruction from daily head-on collisions like they have in China and Japan or France and… wait… none of that actually happened, did it?

Please just sit down. If you’ve never ridden on a passenger train just sit down. If you’ve never ridden a train outside the US just sit down. You know nothing and you have nothing to offer. Take a seat and let the grownups talk.

183

When someone’s username is a literal trolling tactic, what more do you need to know about them?

184

Actuall, most HSR is double tracked. Or more.

185

It’s true that super-high-speed rail has a dedicated rail line. But express rail service doesn’t require double tracking at every point in the network. That’s what I’ve been advocating for in this thread, and I wish more states would take that step before jumping to HSR.

I’m also a big fan of HSR but I feel like faster long-haul express train is almost as economically productive as well as being a more achievable intermediate goal to a true national network.

186

Well, if that’s all you think I am, you can remain ignorant.

In fact China has double tracked HSR:

The national HSR mainlines in the 8+8 passageway grid are generally electrified, double-tracked, passenger-dedicated HSR lines built to accommodate train speeds of 250–350 km/h, but passageways also make use of intercity and regional HSR lines with speeds of 200 km/h as well as certain regular speed railways. The Qingdao-Yinchuan Passageway includes the Taiyuan–Zhongwei–Yinchuan Railway, which is partially single-track with speeds of only 160 km/h.

China had at least one HSR collision that killed 40 and sent 192 to the hospital. But what do I know?

So I guess the kids are right. Don’t know why you got so worked up about this, but carry on.

187

I’m gonna stop you right there and ask you to read your own cite that says the entire network is not double tracked, much of it is single tracked.

It seems like you don’t know that in the United States, we lose about 90 people a day to car accidents. Each. Day. So try to have some perspective when you’re talking about the risks of train travel.

No offense but it doesn’t seem like you know much of anything about this subject. Feel free to sit down and listen and learn instead of spreading misinformation.

188

Using a side track means shutting a train down while another passes. Kind of pointless for HSR. having high speed trains make multiple stops on the same track as non-stop trains means a lot of down time on side tracks.

189

China has HSR because a handful of people said so. There is no room for argument from a government that slaughtered 10,000 protestors and is currently rounding up Muslims in re-education camps.

It’s a big fucking deal when rail roads to limited cities run up a huge tab. It’s money that could be used to fix bridges and roads to more places. California is scaling back it’s HSR for that reason. We voted it down in my state for that reason.

We don’t want HSR in the US. It’s a poor return on investment in most areas.

190

Again I’m going to have to ask you to weigh your own uninformed fever dreams against the thousands of real-life rail networks that manage to accommodate express rail and local rail on the same tracks without full duplex tracking in both directions. This isn’t theoretical, it’s a model that is already working in too many places to count. But sure, by all means let’s privilege the imagination of a guy who apparently never takes trains and never goes out of the country and has no hands-on experience on any element of any part of this conversation.

191

I’m not going to argue that the government in China has, and continues to do, fucked up things.
But in terms of this thread, it’s simply a handwave since:

  1. You have given no reason to suppose it would be opposed by Chinese citizens. As someone who lives in China I can say at least anecdotally, it’s extremely popular.

  2. What about all the countries that have HSR but aren’t China? Clearly it’s not a requirement that a government must oppress it’s citizens and suppress dissent to build HSR.

192

It doesn’t have to, if you have a halfway competent schedule planner they can figure out how to set up the schedule so trains meet at the same points each day, and you build your siding there. The rest of the route can remain single tracked. I’ve ridden on plenty of Amtrak trains that have made rolling meets with other trains on otherwise single track routes. I’ve also been on plenty of Amtrak trains that had to stop, which circles around to the point that in order to serve passengers effectively there needs to be investment to ensure that there is enough track capacity for trains to run reliably, whether at HSR speeds or not. The shoe-horning of passenger trains into predominately freight tracks doesn’t work very well.

193

It’s impossible to state what is supported in China because opinion is controlled. And beyond any appreciation for HSR, such an opinion cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to be measured against the money spent on it and what is given up to build it.

What about other countries suggests they are identical in the usefulness of HSR. Japan is a compact island nation and in no way similar to the United States. They have a system that operates every 5 minutes and is packed with people. It meets their needs and without even looking at the history of trains in Japan I’m fairly confident it evolved out of a society heavily invested in train travel. By heavily invested I don’t mean money but infrastructure. Their cities are focused around proximity to rail.

This is the polar opposite of the United States which is a a large country taking up a large portion of a continent. We’re much more spread out. We went from canals to trains in the 19th century and from trains to cars in the 20th century. The nodes of transportation dictate where we live and where we work. You can plot out where canals and trains once existed because that’s where towns evolved. With the advent of the automobile all that changed. Instead of wanting to be close to a railroad the automobile allowed us to get away from railroads.

So where did that leave trains? Trains served 2 purposes, transportation of freight and passenger travel. Ignoring freight for the purposes of discussion that leaves us passenger travel. Again, in the 20th century we had the introduction of cars. But we also had the introduction of interurbans. These were the original HSR and were capable of 160 kph. This was ridiculously fast in the early part of the century. They had problems filling seats and resorted in the creation of amusement parks to increase ridership. Think about that. In a time when mass produced cars were just coming into their own and paved roads were a novelty they still had problems filling the seats of a much faster interurban traveling on a smooth rail.

So here we are in the first half of the 20th century and we can’t fill the seats on HSR. And this HSR wasn’t even at tax payer expense. It was privately funded. The interurban was quickly replaced by buses that could travel anywhere and were independent of a massive infrastructure. They weren’t as fast but could be located anywhere and that was a huge advantage over rail. It still is.

What did trains have to offer at this point? They still offered long distance travel with meals and sleeping arrangements. That was a big deal if you were traveling 1,000 kilometers or more. You needed to eat and sleep. But we all know what replaced that. Airplanes. By the end of WW-II we saw the introduction of large airliners with planes that traveled as fast as today’s HSR. It was much easier to build 2 miles of runway than thousands of miles of track. A huge advantage over HSR. That advantage increased with the jet engine. Airliners routinely travel at close to 1000 kilometers an hour. A coast to coast flight from LAX to JFK is 5 ½ hrs.

Where does that leave HSR? Narrow corridors where a slow train of 500 kph is more convenient that an airplane of twice the speed. A narrow, highly specific corridor that costs billions to construct. Japan has the population density and historic infrastructure of train travel to make use of HSR. It makes sense for them to build on that infrastructure. Countries like India have significant deficits in infrastructure. Building a HSR system is money taken away from their crumbling electrical grid. A truly bad idea on their part and it will damage their economy.

So with all that said, what possible reason could the United States have for a national HSR system? We would be replacing a much faster system of aircraft that can serve many many times more communities per money invested. It would be a mind boggling step backwards at a ridiculous cost.

194

Only one train can exist at any given time on a section of track. If you have to side track a high speed train to let another train go buy then you just lowered the number of runs you can make and it slows down the process. Honestly this line of argument doesn’t makes sense when discussing HSR. it’s half the speed of airlines and the public cost is enormous. It makes it almost impossible to pay for itself on any level or provide a convenience that justifies the prices because it greatly limits who can use it based on the location of the track. It’s a tax funded expenditure that defies any return on investment to the vast majority of people paying the tax.

195

How much more would it cost to have four tracks (two in each direction) instead of two? I think not much. Especially in California, the land acquisition costs are enormous, plus there’s land preparation, drilling tunnels, building stations and acquiring the trains themselves. All of that is independent of actually laying rail. So can we end the sidetrack? (Sorry.)

196

the land cost would be minimal but everything else doubles. Once constructed the operating costs would have overlapping efficiencies.

But forget the sidetrack, what is the cost of the system in California and what do the taxpayers get? Remember, the money has to come from somewhere. How many people would actually use it versus what the rest giving up for those few people?

The test for this is to run it out to a ridiculous level and then work it back. What if California built a rocket that could take 10 people from San Diego to San Francisco. it’s 450 miles as the crow flies and it takes 10 minutes. They have 30 scheduled flights a day each way so 600 people can make the trip. It costs 200 billion dollars to build.

Clearly a waste of money because only a few people can make the trip and it destroys the transportation budget for the state. Work it back. at what cost does a transportation project justify itself when taken out of a transportation budget?

The answer involves, IMO, a restructuring of transportation. Does the project eliminate the need for roads? It can’t be a bullshit answer. What highway(s) will be shut down for this project? Something HAS to give.

The only exception to this is if the project generates money. It doesn’t have to be a direct quid-pro-quo. by that I mean it doesn’t have to generate a profit unto itself. Many public projects have created regional wealth beyond the cost to taxpayers. The Erie Canal was one of those projects. It turned New York City into a massive financial power house. MASSIVE. The same attempt at canals in the state of Indiana almost brought it to it’s knees. It was a financial hardship for the state. Trains have done the same positive things to cities like Chicago.

I don’t see this happening with HSR in the United States. I think any advances in transportation in the 21st century will have to be in modern technology and not a reinvention of old expensive technology. A faster train is still a train and it’s anchored to tracks that limit origin and destination and at a very high cost.

197

How on earth would you run single track HSR? My cite said most of it is double.

Let’s say you have a 400 mile run, city to city, taking two hours.

So if it is single track, the northbound train would have to wait until the southbound train had arrived to leave. With normal trains, they can go to a siding and stop for a minute, but not HSR.

So, stop with the insults.

198

Right, you can’t have a 200 MPH train come to a stop for 10 minutes on a siding.

199

Not with 200 MPH HSR, my cite said you are wrong.

200

You dont have to necessarily oppress your citizens to have a strong central government that can override eminent domain issues, environmental impact concerns and county/ city concerns.

That’s the issue here is CA. And in China they just did it. We cant do that in the USA.

Individuals, cities, counties can all sue, environmental impact reports take time, etc.