High speed rail? I’d settle for a functional railway of any sort. Have any of you ridden Amtrak across the country? Forty-two hours (if you’re lucky) to get from Seattle to MSP. The reason is that there are no dedicated tracks for passenger trains and every time a freighter comes through, Amtrak has to take a siding to wait for it to pass. Add to that the appalling condition of the track itself. Large parts of the system are what are called “temporary” tracks, on which a train must slow to about 15 mph or risk derailment. The “temporary” tracks in the Midwest have been there since the Red River flooded many years ago, and Congress has blocked attempts to fund it for some reason. For a people moving train system to succeed, it needs dedicated tracks to move on. As I said, I’d happily settle for that rather than investing billions in high speed rail.
I was looking at more of a “Major Population Center to Major Population Center” plan covering at least the capitals of each province. Vancouver to Calgary to Saskatoon to Winnipeg to Toronto to Montreal to Quebec City.
And while you do have the drop from Calgary to Winnipeg as foothills where it’s hilly, it’s fairly flat land, overall. You can, without much effort, lay highway and track. Especially when compared to the Calgary -> Vencouver leg. The Winnipeg -> Quebec City area can get all sorts of undulating, but building highways or train tracks there is very easy also.
From the perspective of highway and track construction, it’s flat and easy until you hit the Rockies.
For your specific corridor, what do you do when you get to the other side? My previous statements about how close everything is comes into play: You must rent a car at the other side to get anywhere. This is why rail (subway) works so dang well in New York (Europe fits this as well, most of the time): When you get to your stop, it’s close to where you want to be.
In terms of some place like California: There is no way to create all the stops you’d need to make it viable to be used by a lot of people. Yes, you hit a bunch of cities on the way, but after you get off, you have to find another method of transit to get to where you’re going. California grew around the car and sprawling suburbanization. If you got a job in San Francisco while living in Riverside, you moved to somewhere close enough to drive to your job.
Now, let’s say that a rail is magically installed today. You live in Riverside and have a job in San Francisco. In addition to the several hours of travel, once you get to the proposed Oakland stop, how do you get to your job once you are there?
We have to either eliminate cars and grow more dense as a population or find a better way.
Along that line of thought, I was actually pondering on Musicat’s comment:
If we can continue to get people into electric vehicles, we can clean a lot of the pollution coming from the tail pipes. In a “futuristic, utopian society” view, we could probably also help reduce even more pollution by not having batteries on the cars and instead having them touch wires over or embedded in the road. (Or, maybe, wireless charging at 75MPH?) Then we could get the benefits of high mobility (pollution reduction) without the need to try and completely alter all of our cities to meet new transportation requirements.
Couple of things to consider…
That is what they were thinking in CA thru the Central Valley - it is one of the selling points - lots of easy, flat terrain the train could cover quickly. What could go wrong? They forgot about the productive farmland and local residents who are not as easily convinced.
I believe they are planning on having the CA HSR train roll right up the peninsula to a new transit terminal they are now building in downtown SF. More fallacy with their plan - you are not going to convince residents in some of the most expesive real estate in the country to accept a train roaring thru the genteel neighborhoods of Atherton and Palo Alto at 100 mph. It will be a long way to the south until the train could even achieve maximum speed, and then it will have to overcome some mountains before hitting the flat, easy terrain. Aint gonna happen.
Today, Amtrak runs along the East Bay and you transfer to a bus at Emeryville, that drives across the bridge to SF.
I would like to point out the fact that we have, by far, the largest rail transport network in the world.
Warning, this link takes you to the CIA, open tab to transport.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
Russia is next with less than 100,00km of track.
We obviously have enough right of way and basic infrastructure to make a US passenger rail network travel work, why aren’t we using it for that? Demand.
This may all change in the near future. Rising energy costs can make car and air travel expensive enough to provide demand for long distance rail, we shall see.
What is beyond me. The pricetag for new rail projects. In the process of building the inter-continental railways and later, the US interstate system; huge rights of way , easements and land were given out by the Government. Why can we use what is already there?
I am a fan of intercity light rail, saw the Dallas one begin and am watching the fledgling one here get going (all is not well), in Houston, TX
Capt
Apologies for my punctuation, grammar and over all awkwardness.
True, but I wasn’t talking about NIMBY interference.
It depends. We have a high speed light rail that used sound insulating walls where it went through residential spaces and there hasn’t been a lot of huff and gruff about the noise. HSR and Light Rail are quite a bit different, but I think (without data backup!) that we could do something to mitigate noise. But I do admit that there would be a lot of opposition to it.
That’s pretty much what has to happen. The highly populated areas have to be completely restructured to take effective advantage of mass transit.
People have said this for as long as I’ve heard talk of rail. Energy and fuel will become expensive and make the investment worth it. I’ve never bought into that because of extant and missing infrastructure.
Let’s say that energy and fuel prices jump by 100%. It’s still incredibly cheaper to use the existing roadway or airport networks than it is to use a mass transit method you have to build. Unless you want to build it now, but it will need maintenance and such until such time that everyone gets priced out of air conditioners and gasoline.
You can get people to use bus transit more during price spikes. But that’s only because it uses existing infrastructure.
Because that easement has been given over to local control. So you still have to get approval for your rail link through 121 different municipalities, each likely with slightly different implementations of laws and ordinances that you’d have to follow. It’s why most large-scale projects are looked at from the state level.
As for Houston, are you sure you have any easement left from the highway system? I’m fairly certain that I-10 has 26 lanes at some points. 
Farin We did have an easement for the UPRR along I-10 but it was mostly removed for its expansion, Thank You Tom Delay.
I was talking about using existing space between large cities but yes you still need to get them into cities and this can be problematic.
FWIW we have a huge series of tracks, switchyards and the like in and around Downtown. In fact the baseball station was Union Station(partially) at one time.
Capt
Are those tracks and switch yards still in operation? If so, I bet you’d have a fight on your hands to take them over for passenger rails. Or you’d end up with what Amtrak does with freight trains already: give up right of way and wait for the trains to haul ass past them.
Lovely, if anybody in Chicago wanted to go to St Louis instead of someplace–anyplace–else. Ever. It’s an interesting proof of concept, but little more. And we’re confusing the issue by mixing a discussion of high-speed rail with one of light rail.
Rail, for a country like the US, is fantastic for cargo. It reduces pollution and congestion and uses the energy to move the cargo and not the train, as in passenger train.
Cargo weighing many tons per car. Even a full passenger car only carries a couple tons of paying “cargo,” reducing the train’s efficiency. Then with multiple stops and the staff that is not needed with a freight train it’s not hard to imagine a passenger train being terribly uneconomical. Which is why railroads have always preferred dumb freight over griping people.
And we do it very, very well. The American rail freight industry is leagues more efficient than anywhere else in the world. The thing is, this is a massive boon to the environment, the economy, and probably makes people’s lives better on a daily basis. But it’s the kind of great thing that nobody sees or notices. It’s designed to be unobtrusive because freight trains aren’t sexy. But they’re effective.
I should also point out an even bigger and nastier competitor for rail: busses. Services like Megabus are efficient, cheap, comfortable, leave regularly and offer much more convenience than trains. In theory they are slower than trains; in practice, they’re often much faster for two reasons. First, trains follow railways which may go way out of your direction, or just plain don’t go where you want to go. Second, stops are much more expensive in terms of time and tend to be set by politics. Granted, there’s no bar built into the busses. Busses may not be sexy show-projects, but they work.
Saskatoon is not the capital of Saskatchewan; Regina is.
That point aside, I don’t think you appreciate the vast distances in Canada between those major population centres, and the comparison to the competitor to très-grand vitesse, namely air travel. TGV will not get you from those major centres faster than air.
The average speed for TGV seems to be about 300 km/hour.
Calgary to Regina is 758 km, so a TGV will take about 2½ hours. By jet, it’s about an hour. Even adding time to airports and check-in, plane beats TGV, so why would TGV be economical?
Winnipeg to Regina is a bit better: 573 km, so TGV would be just under two hours. But again, a jet beats that; just under an hour. Where’s the competitive advantage?
And Winnipeg to Toronto? 2233 km. 6 hours by TGV.
You’ve obviously never heard of the Canadian Shield. :rolleyes: It was one of the major obstacles to the building of trans-continental railways in Canada. Even today, there is only one highway which runs the entire east-west length of the Shield. Building a TGV through the Shield would be horrendously expensive.
Thankfully, infrastructure projects like the Big Dig in Boston or the 105 Freeway in Los Angeles were built before any of this pesky environmentalism or minority/female contracting or anything else mentioned in the OP. I have no idea how those things would happen today, but apparently they were built hundreds of years ago.
Of course, the solution is to focus on roads. Because the government never has to subsidize road-traffic in any way whatsoever, and roads always get built all over the place without any opposition whatsoever. I mean, who on earth would oppose expanding a road from two lanes to three lanes even if it meant getting rid of their front lawn?
Cannibalize buses? You mean people that used to ride the bus began using the train instead when it became available? How terrible.
Transit policy shouldn’t be only about how many people you can induce to ride the bus. It should also be about improving the product.
Self-driving cars will make the entire topic obsolete.
No they won’t. Individual cars are still horrendously inefficient in terms of energy use, and unless there is a rapid large-scale migration to clean propulsion technology, they’re also the major source of emissions. And the problem of highway congestion remains, even if self-driving might improve it marginally. These are all reasons why public transit systems are such a key part of transportation infrastructure.
And how much of the U.S. transportation market can be served by mass transit? How much will it cost in total terms (environmental, economic and social)? I am guessing way less than 5% (generously) and even that doesn’t come freely or without extreme disadvantages. If you have better numbers, feel free to document them. The U.S. is a huge place that depends on many different modes of independent transit to make it work. Plunking down random mass transit lines doesn’t cut it or help anyone.
Don’t knock improvements on the other parts because they are the ones that actually matter. I also think electric self-driving cars are the true way to real efficiency rather than a 20th century compromise of what can be done.
The train hasn’t been derailed. It was never “railed” beyond an expensive dream by a few politicians.
My state turned down the money after doing research into it’s viability. It was determined that it would cost more money than it generated and would be a financial drain.
I don’t think that high speed rail OR the Denver airport really makes your case for you, but honestly…you might have a point that the government today is unable to do large scale projects. I think part of it is the fact that our government system was never meant to operate in such a poisonous and contentious environment, where a major party or parties are unwilling to compromise or work with the other. Our system is all about compromising and finding a middle ground, and pretty obviously the Republicans are unwilling to do this. And, honestly, the left wing and more radicalized portion of the Democratic party aren’t either. Add to that the things you brought up about environmental groups (which, IMHO, learned this lesson by stopping and stifling nuclear power in the US and has just used that experience to stop projects they object too) and coupled with a seeming reluctance on the part of the American people to come together in consensus (and of course pay) to do mega projects and it’s probably true that the time that sort of thing is over in the US, at least as things stand today. We will never do anything epic in space again, we will never build on the scale of things like the Hoover Dam again, we will never build the equivalent of the transcontinental rail road or the interstate highway system again, and we will never build visionary science projects like the Large Hadron Collider…I guess the time for the US to do stuff like that is over, unless things change. I just can’t see us, as a nation, ever agreeing or being willing to compromise enough to reach enough of a consensus to do any of that level of thing again. 
I’ve noticed an extremely high correlation between people who publicly decry partisanship and people those immediately point the finger at their political opponents for their massive policy failures.