Following along lines already utilized for transmission lines dramatically reduces the amount of individual private property parcels to be bought.
Well there’s the fact that the number of passenger-journeys in 2017 was 1.47 billion, surpassing conventional rail and air journeys.
Where are you going with this?
The argument is that we don’t have the political will to spend the money to get HSR. China can bypass that because of their totalitarian government. But some are arguing that there would have been the political will in China without that.
The fact that people use HSR doesn’t mean there would have been the political will to spend that much of taxpayer money on the project. Here in the US, people who object to HSR try to stop it.
When it comes to skipping cities or not, you can do it both ways. Express trains don’t stop; local trains do.
In my experience in China, say, from Shanghai to Nanjing, it was about 1:20 express (one or two stops), and about 2:05 with about six or seven smaller area stops. Price was always the same, though, so express was my first choice.
When making this trip a lot, that extra time really was a drag.
In order to have both you would need 2 tracks in each direction.
And this is how I remember the set-up in Germany in the early 90s. At least at the stations, the Express trains had a siding to bypass many local stations where the slower “local” train stopped. I remember standing on a platform and seeing the Express trains zooming-by the station at full speed.
I am not sure if tracks were shared anywhere, via some sophisticated routing process.
Wow, that seems really wasteful. We should talk to literally every other country on earth and ask how they manage both local and express without having 2 tracks in each direction.
We already know how wasteful it is. that’s why it keeps getting shot down.
Having read the thread up to post #167 I’ve seen a lot of comparison to regular trains as well as to HSR in other countries and to short airline/long automobile travel. It seems to me those last two players have vested interests in political/social/PR resistance to High Speed Rail.
Southwest is charging $70/seat for a flight from LAX to SFO with a dozen flights a day five days a week and…what?..100 passengers per planeload? That’s a lot of profit to lose to the competition – High Speed Rail. United, Continental, Spirit, and other carriers are selling similar routes and rates? They’d lose passengers and profits as well. All those people sitting around waiting for flights? They get hungry, thirsty, and bored; that’s a lot of restaurant and concession stand profit that the terminal merchants will lose.
If people are taking a High Speed Train instead of their cars on their multi-hundred mile trips, that’s a lot less wear and tear on the tires, shocks, and other components, that’s a lot less consumption of gasoline, that’s a lot less snacks and drinks bought at filling stations, that’s a lot fewer meals consumed on the road – that’s a lot less profit to be made off drivers and their families.
Even if I, as an airline industry executive, might generally consider the automobile industry exec to be something of an adversary, I think it would behoove both of us to support the dissemination of messages that emphasize the potential problems and discomforts involved in High Speed Rail travel. After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and railway stations lack the security of an airport terminal or the independent scheduling and routing of a private car.
History plays a part in this debate as well.
When Commodore Perry first went to Japan he brought (among other things) a miniature railroad$ to demonstrate to the Emperor. The Emperor loved it widespread adoption of railroad transportation was practically an edict. What nobody in the thread above seems to have noticed, though, is that the railroads are not a nationalized product. There are actually several major rail line companies – that’s right, private rail lines – which use a standardized gauge of track and share stations in common. But the fact that Japan is roughly the same size as Baja California (Mexico) and the US Pacific Coast States [and perhaps some of Vancouver Island, Canada] is precisely why it was possible to cover the whole nation with a spiderweb of rail lines and stations in a relatively short time.
In contrast, the United States is spread out across so much land that, even with two companies literally racing to lay track toward each other, a line running from the Pacific coast to the middle of the country took six years – by which time steam- or gasoline-driven horseless carriages were becoming popular on the east coast. While trains were considered reliable and sturdy workhorses for freight and long-distance passenger travel, the new Automobile was rapidly becoming the favored means of travel for medium and short distances, with Rockefeller (Standard Oil) and Vanderbilt (asphalt roads) facilitating the popularization of automobiles just around the time the railroads were finalizing their cross-country connections.
Half a century later, Eisenhower’s post-War defensive strategy facilitated another boom in automobile culture. Ike proposed spreading our military and manufacturing industries out so that strategic bombing would not be able to cripple the whole country’s war capability. Then, to facilitate the movement of products between no-longer-clustered factories and research centers, he suggested a systematization of inter-state highways with those running mostly north-south being odd-numbered and those running mostly east-west being even-numbered. Travel by car then became the default mode anywhere west of New England# and car culture encompassed everything from banking to movies to restaurants to popular music.
And so it has continued to this day: Trains and ships may be great for cargo, but they have been eclipsed by the automobile, which allows individualized travel with maximum speeds that far exceed that of horses and bicycles (the other individualized transports). And, even if we’re all going from Point A to Point B along the same route (e.g. crawling along the 405 freeway slower than a first-grader can walk), at least we are not exposed to the uncleanliness of the masses; at least we can express our individuality in cars that are personalized with trinkets hanging from the mirror and bumper stickers we selected from unique catalogs. There is an inherent elitism in the use of cars rather than mass transit, to the extent that those who consider themselves elite would never deign to take a bus or trolley. I suggest to you that this attitude also plays behind resistance to the creation of a bullet-train in the United States.
–G!
$ By the time Perry got to Japan, Karl Benz had been making and selling automobiles for about a year – but the railroad had been around for eight decades. Mass production of automobiles would take another two decades, and it would be about another decade before Ford would make assembly-line mass-production of cars the standard method.
YES I’m exaggerating.
I’ve said it here before, but when the general consensus is that government sucks, government projects always waste money and bring no value, and that the rights of the individual are sacrosanct, America will be incapable of grand projects such as Apollo, the highway (or even the State Route) system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, etc. The conservative ideology, so focused on the individual above all else, is not one geared for greatness, especially on a collective scale.
Since 1980, what has America achieved which is new and truly cutting edge? We already had the internet, microprocessors, genetic editing, Microsoft, Apple, etc, by then - now we have, what - Facebook? The iPhone, which is the combination of technologies from 1876 (the phone) and 1961 (the internet)? The collapse of the Soviet Union? Well… if you think Communism is doomed because it’s fundamentally flawed in one way or another, then America can’t take credit.
I guess we’ve created a lot of new financial instruments. That’s something, right?
Anyway, this thing collapsed because we do not currently live in a country which aspires to Great Things, which is a shift from the prevailing post-Civil War mindset, an attitude which lasted for 100 years. It’s that simple.
Largely agree.
This isn’t a good line of reasoning though. The US remains a very innovative country even if it’s just universities, west coast startups and big pharma responsible for that innovation, and not government investment.
As for what has been invented since 1980, this is a common sentiment on the Dope, and I think it’s based on two misconceptions:
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“If I can find some precursor to an invention then it wasn’t “really” invented now” – sorry but you can almost always find precursors for anything humans do
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For most technologies there is a significant lead time between first demonstration and widespread adoption.
If the technologies that have become commonplace so far in the 21st century don’t count as being invented now, then to be consistent, we have to realize that people have yet to hear about most of the things being invented now.
Looking at it as someone who takes fairly regular Dallas-Houston and Dallas-Austin trips, and who’ll likely be taking a lot more of them in the future as my wife and I’s parents age, flying is kind of a pain- the actual flight time is only about an hour, but it’s all the other stuff- security checkpoints, baggage, parking/pickup, carryon restrictions, etc… that make it a total pain. It usually adds roughly 45 minutes I’d say.
Plus there’s the question of weather delays and all the myriad other reasons planes can be late or not take off on time. And there’s turbulence, bad weather, and all the other actual in-flight PITA stuff.
By contrast, assuming that the US HSR lines will work akin to the European ones, you’ll go to the train station with your stuff, go in, put your stuff on the racks at the front of the car and take your seat. The train will leave on time, take roughly 2 hours to get to the other station. No seat belts, no turbulence, no restrictions on when you can go to the bathroom or walk around, no security checkpoints, no restrictions on contact lens solution bottles or toothpaste tubes, no baggage check, etc… All in all, a MUCH more convenient and pleasant trip. And still at roughly half the time of driving the same distance. I’ve taken several HSR trips in Europe and loved them all.
If you’re going to create a conspiracy theory, it helps to get your facts straight.
The Golden Spike was laid in 1869. There were no cars, steam or otherwise, running around the east coast, or anywhere else, at that time.
Commodore Perry went to Japan in 1853-55. Karl Benz didn’t make his first car until 1885. In fact, he was 9 years old when Perry went to Japan. Mass production of automobiles took another 50 years after Perry, and 20 after Benz.
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more, no less. (#29)
Very likely true.
Is it your opinion that that convenience and pleasanter trip for the relatively is few worth spending $77B plus?
You missed the part where you’re wrong about the waste. It doesn’t require 2 tracks in every direction. For reference, see any train system anywhere in the world.
If the TCR people want to spend that, it’s their business. They’re doing it through private funding.
As to whether it would be worth that much in public funds; that would really be more dependent on the environmental aspects, I’d think. I could see a case made where someone could assign a dollar value to environmental damage/CO2 emissions from planes and cars, and show that over some time period, the electrical HSR would actually pay off.
I loved this about taking HSR in China. I don’t think anyone who’s against HSR in America thinks that it’s an unpleasant experience; we mostly think that its cost-benefit doesn’t work out as in Europe/China, because we don’t have the population density to support it as a national network. Not even China has a truly national network, yet.
Hell, I loved that every time I took a Chinese train, I was costing their government more money.
Would I appreciate being able to go from Detroit to Traverse City in just over an hour for 220 RMB? Err, I mean $33? Yeah, that would be awesome. Except Traverse City doesn’t justify an end point, financially, and it’s not on the way to anyplace else. You can build on the east coast, of course, but now you have the problem that you’re charging everyone there, when only the people who live nearby stand to benefit by it, leading to taxpayer objections.
I’m not defending the current state of the project, I’m just pushing back on Magiver’s “High speed rail is like Tienamen Square” nonsense.
I would say, yes, you* can *do it with one track. but you shouldn’t.
HSR isn’t a freight train. Having two HSR trains collide head-on in excess of 300 mph relative would not be a good thing.
Plus having one train have to wait on a siding for the other defeats the HS part of HSR.