This thread is a discussion of high speed rail. Amtrak is not “High Speed Rail” by any stretch of the imagination. Even the Acela does not meet the definition of High Speed Rail in other countries.
There’s a big difference between “incapable” and “not worth it.”
The Concorde first flew passengers in 1976 and the TU-144 in 1977. Boeing certainly had the technology and resources to build an American supersonic transport, (and Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas almost certainly could have produced one jointly) but never chose to. The Concorde was a bust and the Tu-144 only few for a few months.
Meanwhile, the U.S. built a space shuttle, but the Soviets gave up their program after one (successful) test flight.
HSR just isn’t worth it in the U.S.
So you’re saying that in places there are high speed rail you can just show up any time you want and be whisked away? Really? High speed also means high frequency?
Maintaining a military empire and building massive infrastructures arn’t compatible unless you are hard evil as opposed to soft evil like the US.
You cut out the first part of his post, which makes it’s clear he’s talking about the fact that you can’t just show up to the airport and hop on your flight, which you can with a train:
I wish the US visionaries could drop their collective boner about high speed rail and get excited about inter-city express rail. We don’t need maglev or any of that fancy shit. If I could have a 100mph train with only like 5 stops to cut in half the distance between (insert your most hated 12 hour road trip), we would be solid gold.
We don’t even need to start with a national network. Connect 2 medium to big cities here, a few more there. People see the benefit, ridiculous commutes become realistic, labor and capital get more mobile, everyone wins.
And commuter transit. If we get more commuters off the roads, we can have more freight trucks on the roads. If we have more freight trucks on the roads, we can have fewer freight trains on the tracks. If we have fewer freight trains on the tracks, now regular speed passenger rail starts looking really good in a lot of directions.
Monorail!! Monorail!!
Being far apart is a feature, not a bug. A huge impediment to using Acela’s potential is that it goes through a high-density regions on the same tracks with the same at-grade crossings as Amtrak and rail. Denver to El Paso can be built on sparsely populated desert and prairies. Build overpasses for existing roads, and HS trains can run full-throttle from the edge of one town to another.
Coast-to-Coast HSR is doesn’t make sense over air travel, but intermediate distances will reduce the near-capacity use of existing air facilities.
EDIT: Aaanndd HMS Irruncible’s makes more sense.
Note that the project is not cancelled. They are still planning to complete the section that was started, with the idea that in some future time, additional sections could be added. (LOL).
IMHO, the failure of the project is not due to any innate weakness in the US’ ability to tackle big projects. It comes down to cost. The initial cost was $33B, but current estimates for completion with the current scope was 2X that, and likely even more. The Governor was right to scale this thing back and stop the boondoggle. Sure,with unlimited funds and a monolithic governing body like China, we can have anything we want, but we do not have unlimited funds, and we have many competing interests.
The proponents of this project also over-promised and under-delivered at every stage. There was no way the advertised benefits were ever going to materialize. If they were able to complete the project on budget, people would be willing to some extent look the other way on the paltry benefits, but the budget for this thing was like a runaway train (pun intended). People started feeling the pain of the budget more than any other constraint - that is what forced the change in scope.
What does that even mean? Was the US transportation system communist prior to Nixon kneecapping passenger rail?
Pretty much. Here are the Tokaido Shinkansen timetables (PDF links on the page) - trains depart every 5 minutes or so during the day. Though of course if you intend to travel on peak holiday travel days, you’d want to buy reserved seats in advance, otherwise you may end up having to stand in the aisle all the way.
When I lived in Tokyo and went to business trips in Nagoya or Osaka, I didn’t bother to buy tickets in advance. I just headed to the station when it was time (or when I was done with work at the destination) and got on the next train.
No, airport security is in place because airplanes are a particularly attractive target for terrorism (at least partly because people are afraid of flight and overreact to terrorist attacks against planes).
If only international flights were protected, then terrorists would just procure weapons in the country they wanted to attack, then take a domestic flight.
But you probably won’t have the same kind of security for trains because:
- Trains are not a particularly attractive target for terrorism the way planes are
- You don’t have a convenient choke-point everyone has to pass through. It’s very difficult to attack a plane that you’re not on unless you’re a state actor with like, fighter jets. But trains are just… on the ground. You can drive right up to them. Unless you build massive walls protecting the whole track, forcing everyone at the station to go through invasive security is pretty dumb.
Basically, the threat model is totally different.
We killed it in Ohio because it would cost the state more money than it took in and there wasn’t a public demand for it. And that’s not taking into consideration the almost guaranteed cost overruns. If it wasn’t viable at X then 2X means we need to cut money from other expenditures or raise taxes. Apply that to other expenditures and the train quickly runs off the tracks.
I need a train like I need a flying car. Both would be fun but I’d rather have the pot holes filled.
No, we can’t. And while this thread has provided plenty of reasons why the California train was a bad idea from the start, you shouldn’t expect to see anything really big get built again, ever. For example, the last time that we build a really big airport from the ground up was in Denver roughly 25 years ago. Many large cities stumble along with old, decaying airports, but no one even suggests building a new one.
Why?
Bureaucracy.
If you want to build anything sizable in America today, you have to:
[ul]
[li]Produce a preposterously huge “environmental impact statement” documenting the effects on every imaginable environmental issue, from land use to water quality to effects on endangered species.[/li][li]Make sure your materials are sourced from labor unions and made in the USA as much as possible. Various laws require this in most cases.[/li][li]Pay your workers a “prevailing wage” that’s 20%, 30%, or 50% higher than the actual prevailing wage.[/li][li]Consult the Native American tribe(s) that originally owned the land to make sure your project won’t disturb their gravesites.[/li][li]Consult with federal, state, and county authorities on a whole bunch of other issues.[/li][li]etc…[/li][li]etc…[/li][li]etc…[/li][/ul]
The bureaucracy ruins everything. Building a mile of subway in the USA costs anywhere from 2 to 10 times as much as building the same thing in some other countries.
Apparently.
I can only imagine what it must be like seeing a train hurtling by at 180mph.
NASCAR on steroids. 
Plenty of videos on youtube. Some are the view from the cockpit.
What about a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and Las Vegas?
About 270 miles and quite a bit through desert (so less problems getting permission to use to the land.)
Don’t quite a lot of Americans like a trip to Vegas?
Pretty much impossible. The only way out of LA towards Vegas is through the Cajon Pass, which is already an overtaxed route and doesn’t have the geography for HSR. You’d have to drive/metro to Victorville first, then rail it from there. The money would be better spent expanding I-5 to 3 lanes each way from Barstow to Primm.
The Washington Post had a good opinion piece as to the challenges the US faces w/r/t building high speed rail, and really the reasons can be extrapolated to most large infrastructure projects. It’s a crying shame, because I really wish we could find the will and means to rebuild the transportation structure to balance it away from car and air travel for short-distance and regional transport, but I doubt it will ever happen to a meaningful extent.
You conservatives need to get your excuses together because if you look upthread, apparently half of you just think rail lines are a commie plot to… I dunno… save the environment or some nefarious thing. Let’s just be honest and admit that none of you give two shits about infrastructure unless it’s more highway capacity for car commuting.