A side question, and something of a peculiar one…
Does it matter precisely where the western and eastern terminals are?
I’m thinking of this with the idea that the terminals at either end also serve as “jumping points” for regional stretches of high speed rail. While New York is the obvious eastern terminal, I wonder if it wouldn’t be more sensible to make, say, San Jose, or Sacramento, or even Stockton the western terminal, with San Francisco serviced by local trains.
It would be a start just to get one between San Francisco and San Jose (and then maybe to LA). Between two major population centers, across an incredibly densily populated region, its hard to beleive it would not be used.
It would be fairly trivial to do (at least compared to a mamoth trans-continental ), there is an existing (by crappy) Caltrain track that could easily be raised. They did the same with BART on the east bay (at least I beleive they did, they could have built it from scratch but I suspect it follows the existing Amtrack lines), which is no bullet train, but much better than Caltrain.
El Kabong Well when you think about a line from New York to San Francisco, you have to realize you’re also linking New York and Chicago with Cleveland in between. You could start there with a plan to link it all the way to San Francisco over time. There are a lot of significantly sized cities along that corridor. San Francisco to Reno might bring a lot more gamblers from the Bay Area for instance.
It would have too much rolling resistance. The rigid steel wheels of a train are what allow them to roll easily while carrying very heavy loads. A train with rubber wheels would be less efficient, and the tires would probably be costly.
By the way, high-speed rail worries me because it seems like it would be very vulnerable. You have thousands of miles of track, and vandalism or sabotage at any one point could cause a big crash. How would they guard against that?
I think that in the short term it would be better to focus on Boston to Miami on the East Coast and Seattle to San Diego on the West coast.
Which is why I think shorter routes in high-population areas (SF->San Jose, SF->LA, LA->San Diego) are a better bet. 190MPH if your competing with air travel is not all that great, if your competing with rush hour traffic speeds, you might as well have a teleporter 
It incoceivable even the most dyed-in-the-wool car lover wouldn’t go with a train when the cacluation is: “I could spend a couple of hours in my wonderful car, or put up with sitting next to strangers for 20 mins”.
Count me as one who just doesn’t understand how this could possibly be a good idea. Revitalize the rust belt? People don’t often go to Pittsburgh or Beckley, WV, because they have better choices of places to go, not because there isn’t a way to get there.
The simple fact is that air travel is generally faster (further the distance, the more advantageous), affordable, and the system is far more flexible than a train system could ever hope to be. Trains connect points, airplanes connect everywhere.
Here on the East Coast, we’ve got the Acela, a moderately-high speed train. And guess what? It isn’t a success. Whoop-dee-doo, it saves all of like 20 minutes over the regular train going from DC to New York. Yippee, taxpayers sank $2 billion into a new train that saves businesspeople half an hour.
It may make sense one day if fuel prices finally get out of control, but spending god knows how many hundreds of billions to create a fleet of high speed trains and the infrastructure to support them? No thanks! Sink that money into hydrogen fuel cell research instead. People and cities can actually use a clean source of energy for cars, which are going to be more important to the US than passenger rail can ever become.
I have some serious doubts about the idea, mostly concerning the scale. These are based mainly on the Japanese Shinkansen, since it’s the most successful large-scale HSR network, and one I have a lot of experience with.
The proposed distance (SF to NY) is more than double the length of the entire Shinkansen network, and 10 times that of the Osaka-Tokyo route which takes 2.5 hours and costs $280 on the fastest Shinkansen route. Obviously the time and cost won’t scale up exactly, but we’re still talking about a very long and very expensive trip, and one that won’t compare well to air travel.
There’s an interesting PDF here that gives 100 to 500 miles as the distance where HSR competes well. Even just NY to Cleveland is 486 miles.
Its not ? From Wired this month:
Well, you have to compare the risks. There were 43,443 motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. in 2005. You won’t have heard of most of them, because they come two or three at a time and get coverage only in the local papers. Trainwrecks are spectacular and get a lot of press, but their overall annual fatality rate, even in countries that rely more heavily on rail, is probably much lower.
Anyway, here’s a page on HSR accidents.
I vote for Sacramento-San Francisco-San Jose, with an eventual link to LA.
Put me in the camp of wanting to know how this will revitalize anything. The OP says it will be “awesome”, but that’s not much of an argument. What will it cost/how long will it take to make even a shorter trip (say: Chicago to NYC) and how does that compare to plane travel. What is the market for train riders between SF and NYC?
I cannot think of one single advantage to a rail network over air travel.
Air travel is just as safe.
It’s just as fast over long distances.
It’s just as affordable.
It’s far more flexible.
I just looked up Amtrak, if I (and the Mrs.) want to have a weekend with my sister in Baltimore, going from NYC (~ 200 miles, 3.5hr drive), it would cost us upwards of $350 for round trip tickets, on the regular train, (Acela would be $500+) not including the cost of getting to and from NY Penn, and the trouble of getting picked up in Baltimore. I also have to budget time to get to the station, layover at Penn, and the time to get picked up. Ultimately, the train, takes just as much time as driving, (maybe Acela saves me a bit) and would cost about $250-$400 more, with tolls, $3 gas and a gas guzzling car.
By the time it really gets worthwhile to take mass transit, a plane would wind up saving me time and money over the train.
Agreed. People who want to go from West Coast to East Coast aren’t looking for a slower way to do it. A 12-hour train ride is poor substitute for a 4-hour plane ride unless it’s 1/3rd the cost or less. What would be useful would be regional rail to compete with very long car trips. Build state-of-the-art high speed links directly between major cities, then local rapid rail feeding the major cities. This way I could easily manage a 700-mile trip without having to sit in a car for 10 hours or waste 5 hours from terminal to baggage claim. From train station to train station it could be just 3.5 hours, allowing for boarding time. Now that’s a savings people would recognize, and relieve some strain on the national air network.
When I lived in Japan it was possible for me to get to anywhere else in Japan by boarding the bus station in front of my house. The bus fed a train station, the train station fed the airport (and the airport was optional because the train and bus network covers the whole country very well). Having a car was unnecessary. I look forward to the US reaching that level of transport sophistication.
Carbon footprint is way better - as already noted you can use non-carbon sources of electricity to power the trains and even if the electricity is not carbon free the carbon dioxide is not emitted at altitude as with a plane.
As to cost - well building the lines is not cheap. The high speed rail link from London to the Channel Tunnel cost over GBP 5 billion (over USD 10 billion) for 68 miles. Mind you a lot of that cost was in tunnelling under London to get to the station and air travel des not come cheap either. The new Terminal 5 at London Heathrow alone cost GBP 4.3 billion!
Looking quickly at ticket costs. London - Paris return by Eurostar is about GBP140 as opposed to about GBP120 for British Airways from Heathrow. I’m sure you could get a much cheaper budget flight but one of the selling points for the high speed rail is the comfort and convenience. Of course the other selling point is avoiding the mega-hassle of airport security :dubious:
As many have already noted HSR comes into its own on the 200-500 mile city to city services, not crossing continents.
I mentioned in the other thread that passenger rail ought to be refocused around regional rail hubs that connect not only to downtown areas but to airports as well. I see no reason why this wouldn’t work well.
Most traffic is centered around commuting, and there is significant traffic involved in just getting to the airport. Cutting this down would be helpful overall.
Not long ago, I was able to get from my home in Prince William County, Va to Connecticut without getting in the car at all - I caught a bus into Washington, took the subway to Union Station and commuter rail to BWI. The cost was minimal - and less than parking at the airport for several days.
For medium distance, city to city travel, trains are far and away the best option. For example, I can drive to New Haven, park my car in a garage for $10, buy a $30 round trip ticket on metro north, and walk out of Grand Central 2 hours later. I’ll grant that a car trip might be faster, but with ever increasing traffic that is less and less likely. But if I drove, I would have to deal with the stress of driving and being cooped up in my car. Whereas with the train, I can relax, read a book, do work, or go to the dining car if I want. Not only that, but I kept a car off the road and produced way less greenhouse gas. If we had a properly functioning rail network in this country, I should be able to do that exact same thing to travel anywhere between Boston, NY, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. With a proper high speed network in place, trains would be so superior to cars for these trips.
Its that funny people say that driving is cheaper. As someone who has driven to D.C. many times, when you add up gas and tolls, trust me, its not by much. Also, we are currently overpaying for rail travel. We sink billions into the highway system. No one expects it to make a profit. In fact, we’ve set up a system where the true cost of driving is hidden from the consumer. Yet for some reason people think trains should turn a profit. In fact, trains should receive far more in government subsidy than they currently do because they are far more efficient.