I rode on the TGV a couple of times and it was very fast, clean and efficient. Considering how flying is becoming so sucky, it would sure be nice to have something that great over here. Why do we, the richest country in the world, not have anything even approaching the TGV or the Japanese bullet train?
Because we seem to think that Amtrack should be self-sufficent(and yet we subsidize airlines, no?) and our country is so vast? Because we have never invested in passenger rail service since WW2? Since–I dunno?
I ridden the TGV as well, and it is THE way to travel, as far as I’m concerned. No ears popping, no silly flight attendants gossiping in the galley, no fears of spiralling down to certain death, and it’s hard to hijack a train–I mean, where’re you gonna go?
So, I would love to go to St Louis or New Orleans at TGV speed. Or Boston or Charleston for that matter, but it won’t happen. <sigh>
…a strong national government that can override the railroad lobby (the US RR industry wants to carry freight, NOT people). the airline lobby (airlines do not want competition), and the standards lobby(we DO have a TGV (ACCELA), but it can’t run as fast as TGV, for the following reasons:
-the old railbeds have road crossings: what good is a 350 MPH train, if you have to stop every 10 miles?
-the passenger cars are made too heavy (an 1890 law dictates that RR cars weigh a MINIMUM)-this is what caused the brakes on the ACCELA to wear prematurely
-the national government cannot override state legislatures
However, I see the benefit of HS trains as too great to ignore-eventually the RR lobby will be over thrown.
makes you wonder about those millions of $ spent lobbying Congress-surely it must have SOME effect?
It is my understanding that they’ve never been able to make money carrying people.
It’s a lot harder now to make those short one or two hour hops by air, like from L.A. to S.F. Time was when it was almost as easy as getting on a bus, and you could show up at LAX and buy a ticket for the next flight. Now all that’s gone due to heightened security. Suddenly the alternative of six hours on the 5 doesn’t seem so bad, considering that you may not even get on your plane for two hours.
Does anyone think there’s any chance that air travel will become easy again? If not, then it could be a great chance for passenger trains.
If the Feds want to subsidize airlines and let Amtrak go under, they will probably stop that chance. It may very well be best to let some airlines go under and support the above short hop commuter trains, but I bet the airlines have better lobbyists.
In various indirect ways. But not, so far as I know, in the same way as Amtrak.
In fact, it’s rather the complete opposite way from Amtrak. With airlines, the government manages the infrastructure (airports, and all aspects of the air traffic control system) and the carriers are private companies. With railroads, the tracks are privately owned and the government manages the carrier.
Don’t the carriers contribute significantly to that infrastructure, with such things as airport landing fees and fuel taxes?
Funny you should mention California.
Up here in Canada, a country built on the railway, our rails are scandalously underused for passenger traffic, and have been since cuts and privatization under the Mulroney government. From time to time, people make noise about implementing high speed rail in the “Windsor-Quebec corridor”, a distance of about 1100 km (a 12-hour drive) which takes in Windsor, London, Kitchener, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Toronto and its conurbation, Kingston, and Ottawa in Ontario, and Montreal, Trois-Rivières, and Quebec City in Quebec – about 50% of Canada’s population, and a huge proportion of its travel miles, mainly by automobile and airplane.
I personally think that we should really be looking into developing high-speed rail, preferably electric, in this corridor and reduce the massive overuse of greenhouse gas-producing transportation modes. There’s no reason in the world to take a plane from Montreal to Ottawa and yet people do it all the time. A train link, on its own right of way, would take a very large investment but I think it would prove to be a far, far more sensible approach both economically and environmentally.
Not just the Windsor-Quebec corridor, Matt. There are rumblings out here from time to time about some sort of train in the Lethbridge-Calgary-Red Deer-Edmonton corridor too. A high speed one would be nice, but many of us would be happy with something similar to the service in the Windsor-Quebec corridor that isn’t stopped by weather or road accidents, as so often happens to the main road linking those Alberta cities in the winter months. I’d like to see Canada rediscover the train as a mode of travel–maybe not for great cross-country hops, but having travelled many times on trains in the Windsor-Quebec corridor, I can certainly see the usefulness of passenger rail service for trips of up to, say, 500 km. The cost and time and the hassle of air travel to cover that distance doesn’t seem to be worthwhile. Add a high-speed train and downtown-to-downtown service into the mix (as you have in the corridor), and it’s hard to see a downside to train travel nowadays.
I kinda assumed that Americans are just too in love with their cars to opt for other modes of transport.
No lack of places to plant a bomb on the tracks…
Then why is airline travel so common?
I think the population density in Western Europe vs. the US is a major deciding factor. Also the much greater distances in the USA.
I can see the train for short popular trips such as LA to Las Vegas, if it takes not more than twice the time it would take to go on a plane. Otherwise people will be unwilling to waste that much time travelling to the destination. When I go on vacation, I typically want to spend the most amount of time at my destination and the smallest amount of time to get there.
Example: I wanted to go from Orange County (California) to Portland Oregon with a two-year-old. I thought to myself - he loves trains, why not take the train? The train trip would have been around 24 hours and the plane trip around 4 hours. No contest, when you are only going there for 4 days. How fast could a high-speed train do it? Maybe 6 hours? (1006 miles road distance according to Google Maps, and assuming a 200 mph top speed for a high-speed train). 6 hours is something I might consider, especially if it was much cheaper. But 8 hours would be too much of a difference, and I would choose the plane.
Last week I took the bus from Montreal to Toronto (after seeing, among others, certain Dopers in Montreal <waves> ). It took 7 brain-flensing hours (and one breakdown) to go from Montreal to Toronto, for a cost of $100.28 one way including taxes. I have in my posession a return train ticket between Montreal and Toronto, for the May long weekend, for $125.08. The train trip takes less than six hours.
The only reason I got the train ticket at that price is that I got it far in advance. If I could just walk up to the counter before departure and get a return train ticket to Ottawa or Montreal for less than $250 or so, I’d do it. But the last-minute train fares are much more expensive than the bus.
We badly need that high-speed electric passenger train between Windsor and Quebec City. We need electric freight trans as well. We should be electrifying as much of our transport as possible, so that if one fuel becomes scarce or expensive, we can switch to another fuel to generate electricity rather than having vehicles dependant of that fuel grind to a halt.
This implicitly assumes that Europeans aren’t car happy. Perusal of per-capita ownership rates will show that while Europeans have lower rates of ownership per household, they aren’t order of magnitude in difference and correlate pretty well with the increased cost of VAT and driving requirements over that in the United States. The extensive and largely interconnected European rail systems aren’t so much a result of citizens not loving their cars, but rather a high population density and greater propensity toward industrialization, a strong support for government subsidy of rail, and scarcity of fuel and manufacturing capability in the post-WWII era, while the United States was enjoying record automobile production and median incomes combined with an impetus (both by the government for dispersal for civil defense, and homebuilders producing vast amounts of suburban tract housing for the newly-well off and upwardly mobile population interested in providing more “breathing room” for their Baby Boomer offspring.)
New rail development in the United States is a bit of a Catch-22 (“That’s a good catch.” “The best there is.”): rail transit has to compare favorably with air and auto travel in both cost and convenience, but at the same time has to bear the brunt of building an almost completely new infrastructure (existing rail lines are entirely inadequate for use in high speed rail, and low speed cargo transport would cause major interruptions in service of high speed trains) and early public skepticism and apathy toward a new transportation medium. This, combined with the aforementioned lack of population density to make rail travel convenient for regular commuting, make new rail development highly problematic.
I say this sorrowfully, because I loathed air travel even before the current restrictions, and have a fond nostalgia for riding trains, no doubt coming from Hitchcock movies and From Russia With Love (from which I learned to never trust a man who orders red wine with fish.) A high speed train from Los Angeles Union Station to San Francisco or points north, running along the Pacific coastline, would be delightful, and I’d ride up and down on it every weekend to run into my own Eva Marie Saint (my luck, I’d get Janet Leigh). Alas, despite the linked article, I have no anticipation of this ever happening in my lifetime, due to public domain issues, the ongoing California budgetary crisis, and general bureaucratic inertia.
Stranger
Ooh, can I have Daniela Bianchi then?
I had the chance to live in Nuremburg for three months a couple years ago, and I travelled around by train quite a lot. I loved it. The trains were comfortable, I could get up and stretch my legs or get some food, I met lots of interesting people, and for those times when I was stuck staring out the window there was actually something to see. I took the Brussels-to-Frankfurt high-speed line once. We left a little late and the engineer was trying to make up time; he kept the train pegged at 296 km/h for almost the whole trip. And I was in the first car so I could look through the glass partition and through the windshield. That was a good ride.
But if we want to duplicate the experience here, it will take more than just new tracks. Lots of the cities I visited were organized around the train stations, and it was the perfect way to arrive. I’d look for the tourist info offices and get a map. Most of what I’d want to see would be within walking distance. The public transit radiated out from the station, and ran on time; and even a small city like Nuremburg had subways. All of it was easy to find and easy to navigate. Once you arrived by train, you could see or do anything in the city, without a car. There aren’t many U.S. cities I can say that of.
Xema, I believe you’re right that airlines do pay fees and taxes to help offset the cost of the facilities they use, but I still think it’s an interesting comparison. We have vibrant (if not always thriving) travel industries of private companies using public infrastructure, and a moribund public carrier using private infrastructure.
The cost of high-speed rail systems pretty much requires that they serve areas of dense population (which in turn drives up their capital costs, especially those associated with acquiring the necessary land).
This link has a graph (scroll down a bit) that gives costs for various recent systems. Converting from pounds per km to US$ per mile, the range is from $28m to $220m, with an average of about $125m (just under $2000/inch). That argues we’re not likely to soon see an extensive system.