High Speed Rail from New York to San Francisco

Great Debates
101

Considering the time scale we’re talking about, a network we design now might have to change quite a bit before we build the last of it. No sense building a line to Detroit fifty years from now if it’s a ghost town by then. That’s one argument against the whole thing, by the way. Europeans are much less likely than Americans to up and move to a new city. (At least Germans are, I’ve read that somewhere.) I was in Nuremberg for a few months, which was the place to be in the 15th and 16th centuries and is still the largest city in Franconia. The cities, and people, aren’t going anywhere, so it’s probably easier to justify an expensive, fixed-route infrastructure.

The idea is that it lets each group do what it does best. The government establishes the standards, and takes on the capital construction of infrastructure that should last for many decades and may never directly recover its costs. The private operators compete to serve the public, doing research and adapting to the market, and advertising themselves.

Paris and Moscow are connected by rail lines. (I remember looking at a night train schedule and thinking “train gets in to Moscow at noon, that’s not bad.” Then I noticed it was noon the following day.) I don’t know if many people take that trip, but it can be done.

I don’t think many people would take a high-speed train across the U.S. But if we build regional systems in the places where it makes sense to do so, maybe someday we’ll be able to.

This is just the subsidy argument again. From the price you quoted for an airline ticket, after paying for the fuel, the airplane, the pilots, the flight attendants, the baggage handlers and the ticket agents, how long will it take to earn back the construction costs of the airports and air traffic systems (not to mention their staffing and maintenance costs)?

Not that high-speed rail is an open-and-shut case, but if you’re comparing two systems and only one of them has to account for all of its massive capital expenses, it’ll be no contest.

The only airport I travelled through that was like that was Frankfurt. Just like walking out of the terminal, and up the escalator to the parking garage, you could go down to the train platforms. I wouldn’t call it much of a rail hub, though; in number of trains and connections, it was dwarfed by the central Frankfurt station.

It certainly makes sense to connect air and rail travel, but the hubs should be where the riders are. I see this as a system that should be designed to operate on its own for certain trips, not just a feeder network for the airlines.

102

:dubious:
There may just be a handful of us, but I saw Under Siege 2. :stuck_out_tongue:

103

Mr. Moto You’re the only one who really is assuming that suddenly road and air travel would be eliminated. We’re talking about rail in addition to those things. That the price will become more feasible as the price of fossil fuel rises to make air and road travel more expensive. Mainly the reason I picked NY - SF is because there isn’t any rail connecting it today. No one is going to replace the Acela anytime soon, so that makes the notion of a Northeast Corridor HSR patently ridiculous. The West Coast Corridor would be a good place to start. I also think that from New York to Chicago would be good.

For me it takes far longer door to tarmac from my home in Brooklyn to any of the airports. That’s at least two hours extra on both ends, plus the price of cab fare. So the six hour flight to San Francisco is really 10 hours. I’ve made it from New York to Reno in 48 hours with a rest in Salt Lake City by car. So those extra two hours are not as big a deal to San Francisco, but they are a big deal to Chicago. The 7.5 hour trip makes the train ride seem more reasonable, when I can get from my home to my seat on the train at Penn Station in about 45 minutes. 1000 miles at 200 mph is about 5 hours plus time in Cleveland. So it’s about the same by train but a whole lot less stressful. It could definitely compete with business class flights. Being able to walk to the bar car would make it quite a comfortable ride. Add to that the ability to use your phone or wifi, and the train becomes even more attractive.

104

Considering that I’m arguing both for expanded train and bus service and for these to serve airports, how can you say I’m making that assumption?

105

Nitpick: There is – just not HSR.

106

[QUOTE=Cisco]

Presumably it would need to be an express train from NY to SF or else - cost be damned - no one would bother. It could take days or even weeks to get there if it made more than a few brief stops.

[QUOTE]

I was wondering how long we can expect it to take such a train to get from one coast to the other. let’s make a comparison with Europe, where there is a pretty dense and developed railway network

The distance between SF & NY is about 4300 km (guestimate on the basis of maps.google.com) which is about the same as the distance between Moscow and Madrid. If you take a train from Moscow to Madrid, this takes between 50 and 60 hours (link). Note that this includes:

  1. various borders, including some notoriously slow ones such as Russia-Belarus and Belarus-Poland
  2. up to seven changes
  3. slow stretches about half the way (up until Berlin there’s no high speed training possible)
  4. A fairly big detour - going through Berlin and Cologne means taking a route that is pretty far north of the straight line between Madrid and Moscow.

Based on this, I would say that it should certainly be possible to run a train service that connects SF and NY in under a day.

107

I see that this link I posted does not actually produce any real connections, sorry for that. for those of you who are curious/sceptic, go here and check it out.

108

There isn’t? I took Amtrak from New York to San Francisco a few years ago…it took four days/three nights, cost $99 (one dollar less than flying, which is why I took it) and was one of the best things I’ve ever done.

One thing we are forgetting here is the magic of night trains. Even if a trip is twelve hours long, you leave at nine at night and wake up in your destination at nine in the morning- all without paying for a hotel.

Not everyone sleeps well on trains and we’de have to switch to multi-person compartments to make it economical, but for many it can be a very pleasant and relaxing form of transportation. I’d certainly rather take a night train to New York than waste a whole day dealing with airports.

109

I mean that it is a straw man (under the correct meaning of the term) that people are making this argument. You’re saying that those of us who support HSR are thinking we should do away with buses or airplanes. No one is arguing that this should be done. We see it as a way to reduce dependency on airplanes, and well, it would be much faster than a bus.

110

Yes exactly. It sounds like it would be a pretty nice option to me. Perhaps they would even have an option where you can get off at points in between and get back on when you feel like, sort of like commuter rail. That would make it the best deal.

111

Texas almost got high speed rail in the 90’s–connecting Houston, San Antonio & Dallas/Fort Worth. It was a great idea–but Southwest Airlines helped defeat it–too much competition. The Wikipedia article seems pretty accurate. (I was here & remember the whole thing.) The Trans Texas Corridor mentioned is a boondoggle by Governor Goodhair–& will not help Texans.

My mother remembered getting on a train in Houston on Friday afternoon & making it to Dallas in time to go dancing that night. No “high speed” rail involved–this was during WWII. But the tracks were in good condition.

112

BTW, somehow I got on the e-mailing list of something calling itself the “Bering Straits Rail Tunnel Group,” or something like that. No, I don’t get it either. I don’t think there’s enough traffic or shipping of any kind between Alaska and Siberia at present, nor for the far-foreseeable future, to warrant putting money into making such traffic more efficient.

113

You haven’t been keeping apprised of the developments surrounding the newly opened Northwest Passage have ya?

114

I have. But what’s the NWP got to do with anything? It’s a sea route, an alternative to the Panama Canal. And it’s not exactly “newly opened,” it just appears it might become navigable year-round in the future if global warming continues apace. (In which event I would expect all forms of international shipping to be sharply depressed in any case.)

115

I don’t wish to be obtuse, but I just don’t see what difference that makes. Whether government subsidizes the rails or the trains, I would think the costs of operations is still lowered by whatever money Uncle Sam kicks in. I don’t see how subsidizing one would make the other so much more efficient. It’s like as long as someone brings the hot dogs and someone brings the buns to the BBQ, it’ll be okay, but I’m still not seeing an argument why Sally needs to bring the buns and shouldn’t be allowed to bring the hot dogs.

That’s my point. I don’t think very many people would take the trip. Other than train enthusiasts, why would they? I mean, why should taxpayers subsidize what is essentially a cruise liner on terra firma?

Again, it doesn’t matter how the system gets built, I don’t think very many people would want to take a train that takes 15 hrs of travel time (and almost nobody is counting how many stops the train is going to make in the time calculations!) as opposed to a 4.5 hr flight from SF to NYC, plus another 2 hrs or so for security and baggage check. And, of course, the high speed rail network will cost easily hundreds of billions of dollars to build, whereas the sky has increasing capacity at very little public cost.

Again, if we’re going to spend that kind of money on something that addresses the transportation network and the environment, developing clean engines for cars is a better investment by orders of magnitudes.

116

Umm for all intents and purposes newly opened. There hasn’t been much shipping going through it. It’s about 50% less ice than it was 50 years ago. Predictions predict it may be gone by 2014. It is leading to greater agricultural production further north and increased access to minerals. Agriculture in Greenland has increased significantly. It also cuts some of the most significant shipping routes in the world by about 40%, like Yokohama to Glasgow for instance. It gives Canada and Russia the two longest coastlines in the world, while at the same time giving them access to more mineral wealth and more arable land.

A Bering Strait tunnel could unite the North American landmass with Asia providing a land route for goods.

The melting of the Artic icecap is probably the single most significant geopolitical event of our time, far more than anything going on in the Middle-East. When the ME is sucked dry of oil they will still be pumping it up North, and the US, Canada, Norway, Greeland and Russia will be the ones benefitting from it the most.

117

Imagine if two of the guests to your barbecue were a butcher and a baker. One could bring buns fresh out of the oven, the other could bring the best hot dogs he could make, and each one probably cheaper than what you could buy in a grocery store. Each doing what they do best.

The government is good at making big things happen, the Panama Canal, the interstate highways, the air-traffic-control system; but it sucks at serving customers, it’s slow to recognize opportunities, and it has to respond to interests that degrade efficiency (when Amtrak tried to discontinue money-losing routes, the people along those routes pressured their representatives to keep the service going).

Businesses are good at serving people. If they aren’t, someone else will come along who can do things better, faster, cheaper.

At the risk of a circular argument, look how well it works for air travel. No one expects the airlines to build their own airports; no one expects the government to run an airline. Why?

I think we’re vehemently agreeing on this. Very few people drive coast-to-coast on their vacations anymore, does that mean the interstate highways aren’t being used?

I think a well-designed and managed, high-speed rail network could be an effective component of the transportation system in the U.S. As the cost and environmental issues of fossil fuels get worse, it will become more attractive in more places. If we build a network to serve those routes which merit it, we may, eventually, have a system that stretches from coast-to-coast, even if no one person ever travels that full distance.

I found one cite that says $800 million has been spent so far on one runway at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. I don’t know how much of that is “public cost”, but the infrastructure to support the airlines is far from cheap.

It’s not an open-and-shut case. I just hear people dismissing rail travel based on how incompetently we’ve done it in the past. I think we should figure out the best way to go about it, and then we can debate whether it’s worth doing.

118

Opening up the possibility of Haggis sushi. Yum.

119

Amusingly, an advertisement has recently started appearing in some of Montreal’s “Metro” (i.e. subway) cars that at first glance looks like a Metro map with the four lines in their standard colours, but the lines are extending off the map in various directions with the lines ending in places like New York, Toronto, Halifax and, amibitiously, Miami. I forget what product is being advertised, but I find the idea comical.

So, who would take a week-long subway ride to Miami, with about 800 stops along the way?

120

I don’t think that coast to coast HSR is piratical for several down to earth reasons.
First is trip time. I can fly LAX to EWR (Newark) in 5-1/2 hour +3 hour time change for a total of 8-1/2 hours. 2500 miles in the air. by rail the route will have to be longer, let’s say 3400 miles. At an average speed of 170 MPH (more on this in a minute) that is 20 hours + 3 hour time change 23 hours or 1 basically one full day. Advantage air
Second, is right of way. As I understand it, right now Amtrack runs on the rail company rails, and is supposed to have the right of way, but in reality the Amtrack train often sits on the siding while the freight train goes through without stopping. New tracks will have to be built. Either along side of the existing rails, on a separate right of way, or a combo of the two. Advantage air.
Which bring up money. How much is this puppy going to cost? A trillion dollars? Two trillion? Spin the wheel of fortune and give me a number. One sure bet is all the numbers start with the letter T. Advantage air.
Next question, what happens with HSR when you hit a hill? We have a couple of hills out west. One set is called the Rocky Mountains, and the other set is called the Sierra Nevada. I hear tell there is also some little hills back east. What happens to the speed, and the average speed of the train when it hits a grade in the Rocky mountains? A 200 MPH train might be lucky to average 170 when you figure in hills. Advantage air.
How many stops? At 3400 miles and a 170 MPH average speed we are taking about 20 hour not including stops in the middle. every stop is going to add time to the trip. Back when I was a college student, I could take an express bus from my home to school in 8 hours ( 2 stops). A local buss took 12 hours (stopped at every freeway off ramp between LA and where I got off) A pane took 2 hours with 2 stops. So how may stops are you going to factor in? How much time are you going to add to the coast to coast trip?
Lastly what are you going to sell this coast to coast ticket for? If it isn’t cheaper than air fare, why would anyone use it? I just did a quick check of United.com and I can get a round trip ticket for $324.00 At $324 per just how many tickets are you going to have to sell to make the debt service on a trillion dollars? If my math is right just to service the interest at 6% would require metric butt load of passengers. Do really thing you can put over 185,185,185 passengers on the train each year?
This idea is a no go from the get go.