I honestly don’t know how they make the transit economics work in Japan. But it was pretty fucking sweet that I could get on a bus in bumfuck nowhere, take a train to the faster train, take that to the air port, and touch down in Vietnam in less than 12 hours without ever needing a car. The only reason we can’t do that in the western hemisphere is purely a lack of vision and political will.
Commuter rail systems aren’t a bad idea to reduce car congestion in urban areas. Depending, some places those economics ‘work’ (not the ticket sales ever support such trains, but they sometimes make sense to subsidize at the typical level of ticket sales covering ~1/3 of the cost for the reduction in car traffic near urban centers).
But the idea you’d want to reduce freight railroading in favor of trucks is completely the wrong way around if any of the idea is energy efficiency. Freight trains are way more efficient at any given level of technology. Where freight railroading works economically, which is generally at relatively long distances. Freight trains operating near urban centers are carrying goods from far away, generally.
My understanding (which could be wrong) is that there is no high-speed rail in either Canada or Australia. Anyone want to confirm or deny?
If it’s true that CA and AUS also have no high-speed rail, then we probably should be looking at reasons other than US-centric and US-specific ones for our failure to make use of high-speed trains. “Bureaucracy,” for example, might make sense if the US is the lone holdout; it doesn’t make so much sense if Canada and Australia are also in the mix, unless you want to argue that those two nations are far more bureaucratic than Japan and some European countries.
In fact, Boeing, Lockheed, and North American all did extensive development work on SSTs in the 1960s, under an FAA program; by 1967, the FAA had selected the Boeing design. However, by the late 1960s, there was increasing opposition among Americans to supersonic planes, due to concerns about sonic booms and potential environmental impacts of high-altitude flights. In 1971, Congress killed funding of the SST program (before Boeing had built any prototypes), and in 1973, civil supersonic flight over the U.S. was banned.
So, it wasn’t a case so much of “never chose to,” but “it eventually made no sense to.” By the time Concorde finally flew, it wasn’t legal to fly an SST for domestic U.S. flights, and thus, a key market was gone.
:dubious:
None in Spain, Italy or Turkey, either. Like, not ever. And no volcanic activity.
High speed doesn’t mean high frequency, but at least for Spain one of the issues with AVE is precisely that it’s built on high-traffic routes. Why would this be a problem? Because meanwhile other routes which are defined as “secondary” and “low volume” are not getting improved: surprise surprise, a route which only has a single direct train every day and whose combos require two or three changes of train gets less traffic than one with trains every two hours or less between direct lines and single-change combos.
In my first post, I gave a reason why the USA can’t successfully build high-speed rail or other infrastructure. If you think my post was incorrect, why don’t you build a logical argument to refute it?
It is true, however, that when Obama and other Democrats proposed pouring billions of dollars into high-speed rail projects at the start of his term, every single conservative source I know predicted that it would not succeed. It has not succeeded, thus giving us yet another case of conservatives being right and liberals being wrong.
This statement is not true.
I admit I have no practical knowledge about these things. Will they be convenient? Will they be cost effective? What percentage of the population would find using them better than driving or flying? Is there a danger of them becoming disgusting hellholes like public transportation in some cities? Will crime be a problem on them?
The politicization of this issue likely makes finding unbiased answers to these questions difficult to find. I see that California’s projection was $77 billion (with a b) for construction. That’s a lot of tokens in the turnstile to make up the cost.
It also said that it would “stop suburban sprawl.” This seems to ignore the fact that many, many Americans like living in suburbs and driving their SUVs. Now, that may be a bad thing environmentally, but you cannot really force people to use these things unless they really provide a benefit. Is it there?
I believe there are studies showing that transit doesn’t end up taking commuters off the roads. It just enables more commutes total. If you want to reduce car commutes, you need something like a congestion tax. Increasing mobility by giving people more options for getting around is still a good thing, of course, but it doesn’t end up leaving you a bunch of extra space to use for something else. (It’s kind of similar to how giving people health insurance doesn’t reduce the number of people going to emergency rooms for minor problems.)
You said yourself that this is not new technology. Then, in this post, you complain that we need to keep up with new technology. The United States is building commercial spaceports and upgrading launch facilities on both coasts. Japan won’t have a commercial spaceport for at least another three years. You’re looking backwards, at trains, while the other idiots in America are looking at hyper loops, self driving cars, and suborbital commercial space flight. We will be on Mars before California ever has HSR. Hell, we will probably have a train on Mars before California gets HSR. They obviously don’t want it as bad as the politicians thought. It sounded like a nice Green project that came with an injection of billions of dollars from the federal government. Yes, people even voted for it, because it sounded great. Then they realized that it means a train is going to run through their town. Everyone wants a train, as long as its NIMBY.
I’m not quite sure why you’re so infatuated with HSR. Do you think you would personally benefit from it? Or are you just guessing that other people would benefit from it? How would your life improve if there was HSR in California? I’m curious. If you say it wouldn’t really change anything for you, I’m betting there are tens of millions of other people in California who probably feel the same way. It’s just not worth it…
None of the 9/11 flights were international. Everyone goes through the same security, whether you go to an international terminal or domestic.
Central planners always try to get us to live in dense cities so that we don’t have to travel to get to work, get home, and get to restaurants. It seems to me that we shouldn’t need high speed trains at all, because if you live in a dense urban area that has everything, then what need for travel even exists?
That’s because the public don’t know what they don’t know. The Eurostar Train from London to Paris costs about the same as flying, but is vastly preferable - no long check in times, more comfortable, and delivers you from city centre to city centre. And it has to cross international borders.
I’m sure a lot of it is by pricing in externalities. I’m guessing that Japan doesn’t have as many massive taxpayer financed freeways - not paying to build/maintain those probably frees up a lot of money.
And if not everyone needs a car, that also frees up resources.
True, my statement should just have been that (heavily subsidized, they always are) commuter rail systems aren’t necessarily a bad idea. What the total effect of them is on living and travel patterns is more complicated.
As opposed to the idea in that same post that moving freight transport from rails to road would be a good idea, which is completely off the rails so to speak.
In general I think there’s a temptation in ‘urban planning’, not that it’s an invalid concept or unplanned sprawl is always the way to go, to decide what other people should want. A lot of people in the US want peak roof houses with a yard. Not everyone, and surveys and studies go back and forth on what the trend is there, ‘new generations moving back downtown’, ‘no wait not actually’, etc. But a lot of people do, they have votes, they pay taxes, etc. So just providing more capacity to get from the suburbs to downtown (there’s no doubt commuter rail is extra capacity) could serve a legitimate purpose. But you’re right, won’t necessarily reduce road travel if there are more total travelers in response to the capacity increase, same reason adding lanes to roads often doesn’t reduce congestion much.
In general the way to deal with externalities like GHG emissions is try to figure out their real value and charge that (a congestion tax could be partly that as well as charging for the externality of congestion itself; a carbon tax, etc). Not that everyone agrees on those policies. But back to the topic of high speed intercity rail in the US, I think it’s mainly an example of seeking ‘green’ policies that supposedly don’t cost people anything, in fact it’s makes the US ‘advanced’, because voters will go along with that. And they won’t go along with policies of the form: here, you have to now pay for the cost of GHG emissions, not somebody else pay for you, nor is it some magical unicorn of win-win green collar job creation that doesn’t cost anybody anything. But some of the sugar coated green policies, high speed rail in the US a principal example IMO, just don’t make a lot of sense on any other basis than getting people to go along with them, as in being juiced up that it’s some kind of proof the US is still ‘advanced’ if it has HSR.
I’d also add about the theme of the thread of Japan. Assuming whatever Japan does is economically efficient is a highly dubious assumption. A country that was rapidly closing in on the US GDP/capita level 30 yrs ago but has now fallen significantly behind. They know how to burn public resources inefficiently in Japan perhaps more than any other rich country, though certain underlying strengths in the Japanese private sector sustain it. That’s even besides the huge difference in population density between the US and Japan.
Sort of ironically the only place in the US that is conducive to HSR is Texas. It has 4 very large cities that are within 250 miles or each other with flat, mostly empty space in between. The primary obstacle is whether they could use eminent domain to acquire the land.
FWIW, there is persistent debate about the economics of the UK government’s current HST project, as against less eye-catching and cheaper improvements to the existing rail network
It’s a big shame, and it’s because various policies, laws, and regulations always put drivers and car travel first, with rail travel last, due to political concerns. I travel by rail up and down the east coast all the time, and I think it’s still kind of a secret how pleasant rail travel can be. It’s much less stressful and more comfortable to go by train from DC to NYC or Boston than it is to fly, and the time difference is negligible to small when everything (arriving early, checking in, security, getting checked bags, etc.) is taken into account.
If we really wanted good HSR between LA and SF, we could make it happen without astronomical prices, but that would mean changing priorities such that rail requirements weren’t last on the list.
Please, do go on…
Washington, NYC and Boston are all reasonably dense urban areas with commuter rail and other mass transit options for getting around. This is good, since someone coming in on intercity rail like Acela isn’t going to have their car. But what would the situation be for someone who took the now-cancelled California train between SF and LA? I think San Francisco has commuter rail and other sorts of mass transit but how is it in Los Angeles? Can you get from the terminal to other places?
The Bay area, SJ to SF is another, yet the cities fought it tooth and nail.