Spanish poster chiming in: Spain has High Speed rail services, and expanding them at a very high rate. After the 2004 bombings, you will have your luggage X-rayed at train stations in Spain. The process is rather quick, though. I have never spent more than a very few minutes in security at a Spanish train station.
Incidentally, the Madrid-Barcelona high-speed train service is fantastic. A bit expensive, but absolutely great.
I don’t get the “air travel in the post 9/11 world is inherently stressful” bit. It isn’t. There is now no substantive difference between security checks and wait times at any airport i’ve been to in 2000 and 2010. The only difference is that you have to show a boarding pass, take off your shoes and coat, and separate out laptops and your toiletries. BFD.
I think only “are country” people think that air travel is sooper stressful nowadays. In fact, it’s far easier, IMHO: electronic and print-at-home boarding passes have elimitated one previously annoying part of air travel - waiting in the check-in line.
As for this whole rail thing: it’s one part population geography, one part geography period, one part historical industrial development* that makes our rail networks comparably lame.
*our propped-up, directly and indirectly supported government industries of choice in this country have been, surprise surprise, military in nature. Train tracks and trains aren’t military things. Roads and Airplanes (especially airplanes) are. Maybe had we decided to build the Eisenhower rail system in the 50s would we have seen a completely different developmental pattern to our cities which would have lent itself far better to european/japanese style passenger rail with corresponding inner-city public transit and concomitant population densities. We didn’t. It’s a choice which has now locked us into particular modes of transportation for the foreseeable future. No real qualms about it.
I do not buy that the japanese system is any better than european high-speed rail. If you put so much stock in the fact that bullet trains are never more than 6 seconds late versus most european trains probably never more than 6 minutes late, that’s your bag.
very limited. Last January I decided to take the train instead of the plane from Boston to Washington (a good thing, as it turned out – the snowstorm killed air traffic for days) and considered trying out Acela. Then I changed my mind when I saw that the Acela cost almost twice as much, but got me there less than an hour earlier. It just wasn’t worth the expense.
I’m not saying it’s not a step in the right direction. I love trains, and used to take them all the time. It wasn’t that long ago that you had a delay of up to an hour(!) while Amtrak changed engines in New Haven going from one type of line to another. But our trains still aren’t within hailing distance of being competitive, or of resembling trains in the rest of the world.
I suggest reading this article by Brad Templeton, “Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth?”.
http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html
The big point is that passenger rail transportation in the United States is not very energy efficient, both compared to other forms of transportation in the United States and compared to passenger rail in Japan. It looks like rail transport in Japan expends half as much energy per passenger as it does in the US. I think most of the difference is that Japan trains tend to travel with full passenger loads or nearly full. Air transport in the US looks a lot better than you think it would because US airlines have been ruthless in trimming back unprofitable flights, so they average 80% full currently. Airplanes actually use less energy per passenger than trains in the US because of this.
Most of Brad’s push is for ultra light vehicles. It just doesn’t make sense to haul around a couple of tons of dead weight to transport one person, whether it is a car, train or bus.
Brad Templeton is an expert on software and networking. Why the fuck would anyone care what he thinks about trains?
You are way out of date. He has been doing transportation issues for years. He specializes in Ultra Light Vehicles and robocars.
Here he is speaking at the Transportation Future Salon.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3278551662248994982#