But travelling by train is much more relaxing and better part of vacation with a train than with a car, too! You don’t have to drive yourself, you can nap, eat, watch TV, read, walk around inside the train… why spend hours in a car?
I meant that because it’s short it’s good for regional trains.
Going longer distances by car is again, only if you are transporting a lot of stuff (and even then I’ve managed to haul a lot around on a train), or if you want to be indepent at your end point. And even then, there’s the alternative of taking the Auto train (with your car on board) from Munich to Hamburg, or renting a car in Hamburg and driving around the region.
I know that 6 hrs. with the ICE Munich-Hamburg is much faster than with car, because the car can’t go much faster than 150 km/h on average, while the train goes 200-250 km/h.
I’m most certainly not local to the Rhine region! Take that back! I really find travelling to those regions more comfortable with the internet, where every regional group - VRR, MVV and what they are all called - have a search function that allows you to get a route from main station to a street adress, with a PDF of the area around the bus stop to print out and take with you. It also adds a ticket calculator.
I guess the english translation of those pages is not fully up yet, though.
Huh. You must have travelled at odd times, then. While I spent most of the weekends a bit more north - Duisburg - the locals call the A40 Highway, the Ruhrschnellweg, the Ruhrschleichweg (Ruhr sidle path) because every morning theres a traffic jam from all the commuters there.
You don’t like roundabouts? It’s just a bunch of people travelling in that region, who all don’t want to give up their cars. You could beat it by taking the train yourself, you know.
The Eastern Shuttle started running in the early sixties. The security at airports wasn’t much different than a train station until the late sixties, when there was a rash of hijackings.
The fact that terrorists tend to go after airplanes instead of trains is more of a terrorist fashion statement than anything about relative vulnerability. A few pounds of thermite on the rails detonated at the right time would reduce a high speed rail train to a pile of bloody scrap.
Frankly, I suspect that Al Qaeda has poisoned the well for aircraft hijacking. Passengers and crew are less likely to react passively to a potential threat. Notice that the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber were stopped by passengers.
Public perception. Passenger rail’s always had a bad reputation in the States, so it would be hard to get funding for a project. Why take the train when a plane is faster and driving is cheaper?
Again, that whole car thing. A person has many more options driving his own car than taking public transportation, and the US places a much higher value on personal freedom and convenience.
Infrastructure. The United States doesn’t have any existing infrastructure to support high-speed rail, and pretty much all of the premium space has been taken up by everything else already. Also, US public transportation also sucks giant donkey balls (though I will grant it’s much better in major cities).
Geography. There are places in the U.S. that are much greater engineering challenges–in addition to earthquakes, one also has to worry about flash floods, tornadoes, extreme heat and cold, and hurricanes, just to name a few things. It’s probably not as big a deal-breaker as the other three factors, but it’s definitely another obstacle.
And now, anecdote time!
I visited Taipei back when they were revamping their subway system. They were shutting down streets at least one or two blocks at a time, digging up the road to work on the existing rails or build new ones. I recall thinking to myself how likely such a project could work in the U.S.
There is an article by Robert Samuelson in Newsweek explaining why high speed rail won’t work in the US. The economics of the various routes are such that even if 100% of air passengers switch to trains, it wouldn’t pay for itself.
I live in Orlando. Once, out of curiosity, I checked how many cities I have non-stop flights to and it turned out to be over 90. Another 30 or 40 cites I could get to with one stop and practically every city in North America with one change of plane. The idea that high speed rail would replace a significant percentage of that is ludicrous.
But it’s not just air passengers who might see high-speed rail as an alternative. One hopes that some people in autos (particularly those driving solo) might take a high-speed train instead of driving themselves. (There is the issue of how to get to your final destination once you arrive, but perhaps shared car services might be good for that.)
Boston->NYC is anywhere from $95-229. Amtrak.com answers the question well. And it takes 3.5 hours. So you pay $50 more to save about a half hour. If that’s worth it to you. Compared to driving, that is.
As far as I know, no one is proposing high-speed rail as a replacement for daily commuters. And 28,500 passengers per day doesn’t sound like much, but that’s over 10.4 million per year.
No one is proposing high-speed rail for cross-country trips, either.
So, what case are you trying to make? You were originally comparing Boston-Washington with flying, now you’re comparing Boston-NYC with driving. Don’t forget the costs of gas, tolls, and parking, which is not cheap in New York City.
Are you under the impression that changing the units actually makes the number bigger?
That brings up the question of what problem we are trying to solve by borrowing 100 of billions of dollars to build a high speed rail system? If we aren’t displacing a significant part of air travel then what are we doing?
Medium distance trips, such as San Francisco to Los Angeles. It’s terribly inefficient to use runway slots for such short trips.
Samuelson doesn’t get the point. He says:
“Los Angeles to San Francisco led the list with 13,838 passengers; altogether, daily air passengers in these 12 corridors totaled 52,934. If all of them switched to trains, the number of airline passengers, about 2 million a day, would drop only 2.5 percent.”
The point is that the number of air travellers specifically on the Los Angeles to San Francisco corridor would drop significantly, freeing up the airports for better usage.
The train is meant to compete with short distance air travel. To the extent it takes people out of cars, that’s just icing.
28,500 out of 45 million sounds miniscule. 10.4 million out of 45 million is 23%. That includes some repeat users, I’m sure, but if 23% of the region’s population is using something, that number is not so easy to dismiss. And that’s with the modest service that currently exists.
I question his argument on other grounds, too. His comparisons only mention the number of trips, not the distance travelled. And there’s his comment that “even trains need fuel”. I wonder if he knows that high-speed trains are electric.
Displacing the shorter end of plane travel and some car travel.
No matter how you state it, what he is saying is the on a given day 0.06% of the population of the NE Corridor will ride an Amtrak train. The actual number would be smaller, since some of the Amtrak passengers will be returning the same day.
If you want to compare passenger miles, then Amtrak is around 6 billion a year. Air travel is 823 billion and automobile travel is around 3,800 billion. The number are from chapters 8 and 9 in the Transportation Energy Data Book 29th edition, chapters 8 and 9. I came up with 3,800 by using 1.3 people per vehicle. These are all 2008 numbers. I still have a problem adjusting to the idea that we have 250 million vehicles in this country and only 208 million licensed drivers.
These posts are inappropriate for GQ, Please dial it back. No warning issued.
Since the OP seems more interested in advancing a position, rather than simply obtaining facts, at this point this is probably better suited to GD than GQ.
And I would remind the participants to maintain an appropriate level of civility in GD.
Part of the reason is just history. England started off viable train travel in the early 1800’s. The US and much of Europe followed shortly afterward. Nothing is perfect when it’s first started, so England, US, Europe, etc had to all sorts of developmental issues. Which means, even today, if you trace back ‘why can’t we…’ for EU or US trains, some of the reasons will be along the lines of ‘because in 1830 someone made a boneheaded decision…’
Contrast that to Japan. They didn’t start their railways until a good forty or fifty year after the others. So they had the advantage of avoiding developmental choices other nations were stuck with. During WWII large chunks of Japans rail service got destroyed, allowing them to redesign those parts. Also, during WWII the military took over the train system and largely banned civilian travel. People were used to not having trains, so there wasn’t a huge pressure on Japan to rebuild ASAP. Which meant they had time to plan and get it right.
In a way, it’s a lot like the software industry and legacy support. In the 70’s and 80’s certain decisions were made on how DOS works. Microsoft didn’t redesign from scratch until Windows Vista in 2007. So for over 25 years, MS was stuck with Gates opinion from 1981 that 640k was good enough for anybody. Someone designing from scratch after that wouldn’t have to deal with that issue for decades.
Coremelt, I agree with everything you’ve posted in this thread. My take is that high-speed rail will never occur in the United States because voters prefer we send $20 billion dollars to some obscure country rather than spend it domestically. In fact, we have a word for domestic spending: Pork.
Whatever. Travel in America suck. Driving and post-9/11 air travel is inherently stressful. Air travel is not cheap. Last I checked, flights from Columbus to Detroit is over 300 bucks for a 52 minute flight I don’t know what the solution is but the solution <yelling> IS NOT TO BUILD MORE FRIGGIN’ ROADS </yelling>. Is it possible that we can move away from cars to an alternative that doesn’t require compulsory insurance, monthly payments, variable fuel prices?
My point about foreign aid is that voters don’t want public monies spent on the general welfare of U.S citizens. This is why a large bloc of voters starve education and medicare funding - can’t help fellow Americans, they must help themselves (some how, some way)
Well, fair enough. Bear in mind, though, that that same bloc of voters is constantly demanding that we cut off foreign aid, as though we actually offered a significant amount.
I really find travelling to those regions more comfortable with the internet, where every regional group - VRR, MVV and what they are all called - have a search function that allows you to get a route from main station to a street adress, with a PDF of the area around the bus stop to print out and take with you. It also adds a ticket calculator.
It’s just a bunch of people travelling in that region, who all don’t want to give up their cars. You could beat it by taking the train yourself, you know.