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It's strange (not at all funny) to me that a lot of countries a lot smaller than america have high speed rails that can go from 180-220 MPH (Sorry, metzis. Just increase those numbers by about 50% to get your precious KPH)

Given america's size it's obvious America needs this system more that countries that are a lot smaller, yet they have it and america doesn't.

We have a decrepit, pathetic joke called Amtrak that is an embarrassment to the US when compared to most other nations train systems. (Well, ok, we're better than india's) but we can 't seem to get any sort of high speed (Say above 150 mph) anywhere in america.

We do have a leader in america who has seriously proposed and advocated for a national HSR that would serve as an economical and ecologically viable alternative to a lot of air travel.

I'd like to ask non Americans if they have HSR in their countries and if so what do they think of them. I'd like to ask americans if they would favor and use HSR if we could get one in america.

I'm always in favor of trillion dollar boondoggles. Lets do this!

I don't think it's at all obvious that America needs this.

Flight time between New York to Los Angeles is what, eight or nine hours? What would it be via HSR, twice that? I'm not clear on the argument for spending an enormous outlay to build a train system that's going to be twice as slow, at best, as what we have now.



What are the exact arguments in favor of this?

I wouldn't see the idea of a transcontinental train taking off, but something interegional could work, moving up and down the east or west coasts.

Yes, that I could agree with.

 Ouze wrote:
I don't think it's at all obvious that America needs this.

Flight time between New York to Los Angeles is what, eight or nine hours? What would it be via HSR, twice that? I'm not clear on the argument for spending an enormous outlay to build a train system that's going to be twice as slow, at best, as what we have now.



What are the exact arguments in favor of this?

Mostly ecological, considering flying is one of the worst activities for transport, main issue i see though for america is the shere size which may or may not lead to issues supplying such trains with electricity.

Watched an excellent Wendover Productions video about why it's unlikely to happen (read: insanely expensive).

Honestly I'd like to have even non-high speed rail travel increased in the US, but that seems extremeley unlikely. I'd love to be able to take a train to see my buddy who lives 4 hours away.

If I drive it's 4 hours each way and a total of $50-60 in fuel.

If I try to take the cheapest train it's $130 one way and takes like 8 hours between stops/etc. Absolutely insane.

We have hundreds of airports and thousands and thousands of commuter planes. There is basically 0 argument for expanding rail in any capacity. What rail we have currently is acceptable for freight and people here have cars and if it is too far away you can take a plane. If your argument is environmental why exactly would you build a new rail system when you can design new planes with electric turbines and use our currently massive airport system. Also - you see what a few recreational drones can do to halt airports (im sure this will be remedied soon)...imagine how vulnerable trains are to domestic terrorism- do you really think it would be easy to secure hundreds of miles of rail? It's a lot easier to secure an airport I assure you.

The issue is that in the US, society is just set up to make driving so much easier for the average person, and the communities are so spread out, that rail is just never an option people want to think about. In other developed nations, driving is a lot more expensive and difficult to get a license for, cities and towns are built around rail lines, neighborhoods are often planned with access or proximity to rail of some sort. This hasn't been true of most places in the US for many decades.

We also have a not so small cross section of society that recoils at the thought of anything rail related at any scale and fights it tooth and nail as a matter of blind political faith. The mere mention of rail sends some into a tizzy.

In the US, industial conglomerates spent decades acquiring and actively dismantling the rail network in order to push automobiles and car accessible roads, intentionally pushing out streetcars, pedestrians, rail and other such things. That was an organized effort with gargantuan amounts of cash involved, and shifting away from that has little incentive at current costs for automobile transport.

Ultimately, It has been done in other nations effectively with fewer resources than the US has access to. They don't have issues with terrorists attacking rail lines, and freeways certainly arent any friendlier environmentally (dramatically less so in fact). However, the US would have to undergo a cultural change away from the automobile and spend decades rebuilding infrastructure for it to be widespread. The high upfront cost, and typically terrible location decisons for such projects, usually kills the idea if the frenzy of political chaos does not.

It is not possible to give a proper answer to this question because the underlying reasons as to why the U.S.A. does not have HSR are inextricably political.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
It's strange (not at all funny) to me that a lot of countries a lot smaller than america have high speed rails that can go from 180-220 MPH (Sorry, metzis. Just increase those numbers by about 50% to get your precious KPH)

Given america's size it's obvious America needs this system more that countries that are a lot smaller, yet they have it and america doesn't.

We have a decrepit, pathetic joke called Amtrak that is an embarrassment to the US when compared to most other nations train systems. (Well, ok, we're better than india's) but we can 't seem to get any sort of high speed (Say above 150 mph) anywhere in america.

We do have a leader in america who has seriously proposed and advocated for a national HSR that would serve as an economical and egologically viable alternative to a lot of air travel. She has bveen compared to stalin, mao, king jong un and, of course, hitler for her efforts.

I'd like to ask non Americans if they have HSR in their countries and if so what do they think of them. I'd like to ask americans if they would favor and use HSR if we could get one in america.

Keep in mind we had a great and vast rail system and ripped it out in favor of trucking (though also there was a giant pile of competing companies that slowly conglomerated and cannibalized each other in a free for all of naked capitalism that got pretty ugly).

But high speed rail has a major problem in the US- the rail lines that remain go through pretty much every small town and community and have lots of inconvenient crossings at minor and not so minor (but heavily locally travelled) roads. Converting those over into high-speed rail would be... pretty terrible, if even possible (there are a lot of towns built around/along the rail lines, more as you go west, so you'd basically have to rip up towns as you go, claim eminent domain and displace a ridiculous number of people.

And it would also be ridiculously expensive.

Its also a lot easier for smaller countries to have great infrastructure, and keep it modern. Ours is huge and expansive (and corrupt) to the point that the maintenance cycles overlap themselves. By the time one part of a system is done, another is due, even if it was done right in the first place.

----
That said, I've used Amtrak in the past (over flying home for holidays), and known a lot of people who use it to commute. Aside from far-too-regular delays, I like it more than flying even though it took more time. But I also spent less time waiting around an airport, and could move around more in transit. And my knees weren't up against the back of the seat in front of me, nor was I crowded in by people.

On the other hand, Amtrak is... bad. And the giant plaques they have in Union Station in Washington DC listing the engineers who have died on the job are both huge and troubling...

With any luck we will skip the high speed rail stage and move on to what ever comes next. Sort of how America skipped the minidisc player. However I didn't think we are that lucky.

In the US, High speed rail is a solution in search of a problem.

We don't currently have large quantities of people who are commuting over distances that would make a high speed rail system a desirable alternative to driving or taking an airplane. IE: There is no market to sustain this high speed rail system. In the North bay area the SMART train is finally up and running after years and years of trying, and it was still a struggle even when it had the advantage of actually having customers who wanted to move from point A to point B already. A high speed rail from LA to San Francisco would have no equivalent customer base of daily riders.

California high speed rail attempts are pretty much an unmitigated disaster. The tax payer money is getting swallowed up by mismanagement at every level and yet they keep throwing money at it. Really goes for everything in CA actually.

Its really a political stunt by its proponents and not in any way a practical idea.

 Insurgency Walker wrote:
With any luck we will skip the high speed rail stage and move on to what ever comes next. Sort of how America skipped the minidisc player. However I didn't think we are that lucky.

Truthfully, that isn't how things seem to work. If you want a fun sociological/historical theory that really sets people's teeth on edge, look into Technological Determinism. Available technologies dictate the shape of our societies far more than our societies dictate technologies.
People tend to adopt technologies that they have no use for, and let it's capabilities dictate how it gets used. Sometimes they fall off quickly, but in other cases we really end up with bizarre adaptations that aren't actually all that useful.

Its debatable how far the theory can be taken, but there are interesting examples (layouts of towns established after railroads and telegraph lines are very different from towns prior to those techs).

----

Plus, 'whatever comes next' is... dubious. There are limits on large scale, long distance transportation before it hits pure sci-fi. Speed and efficiency are a straight trade with safety and cost, and environmental damage is the main practical thing to mitigate. And that's more an issue of fuel technology than transportation technology. Safety-wise, I'm pretty sure planes still beat almost anything else, but people are bad at statistics, so a few high profile crashes warp perceptions periodically. A better fuel source solves most of the real issues with flight.

Yes I was concerned that "duh terrists" would be one issue people would have.

Still, japan was the first country to have a nerve gas attack on it's civil populace and has HSR.

I'd say that anywhere between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian Mountains is a total no-go zone for high speed rail. Cities there are too small, too far apart, and have too few commuters for it to be viable. Not to mention the total havoc a Midwest winter would have on any rail system, let alone something going that fast.

Existing rail lines can't really be used either, even if "upgraded". High speed rail lines need wider turns, so you are looking at rerouting thousands of turns in the track, which also means rerouting highways that tend to run parallel to them.


Now, I'm not saying some highspeed rail line couldn't be made. I could see something connecting the Albany, New York, Wachington DC, Pittsburg, Philadelphia area perhaps. Also Maybe the LA to Las Vegas route.

Yup. You could have a HSR line up the east coast, that's about it. As countries go, the USA is insanely big and spread out.

 John Prins wrote:
Yup. You could have a HSR line up the east coast, that's about it. As countries go, the USA is insanely big and spread out.

The best thing would probably bee a V line basically the eastcost down, (maybee up to Toronto) and then through Texas into Mexico and from there back to California.

But unlikely.

 John Prins wrote:
Yup. You could have a HSR line up the east coast, that's about it. As countries go, the USA is insanely big and spread out.

It's not even the biggest country in North America.

How much transcontinental passenger traffic actually is there, whether by road, rail or air?

There probably are opportunities to make regional networks as people have said above. The great thing about trains is they can take you from city centre to city centre (by way of an airport if you like.)

I don't think there's a lot of scope for a transcontinental high speed line. You would need two or three of them too.

I'm not sure how applicable it is, but wouldn't the situation with roads hold true here too? In that the counter-intuitive result of building more roads to ease congestion is actually more traffic and no decrease in congestion. In essence with transportation, creating the supply also tends to create the demand - I mean, it wasn't that long ago that flying was for rich people and no everyday person would even consider just hopping on a plane to travel across the country or go abroad, but the airline companies created the capacity and then they used marketing to convince people they wanted to use it.

I'm not seeing any fundamental, inherent reason the same thing couldn't happen with HSR in America, just folk arguing it doesn't exist, therefore it cannot exist. It doesn't seem like a trivial project by any means, but I find it endlessly amusing that you guys will light giant bonfires of money for the sake of your already bloated, already needlessly oversized and overequipped military, but the moment someone suggests spending a tiny fraction of those sums on public transport or infrastructure you turn into a nation of fiscal conservatives quicker than a TGV train

 Xenomancers wrote:
If your argument is environmental why exactly would you build a new rail system when you can design new planes with electric turbines and use our currently massive airport system.

The difference is that electric aircraft as practical long-distance travel vehicles are currently wishful thinking, while high speed rail is proven technology that just needs someone to allocate funding and start building the US version.

Also - you see what a few recreational drones can do to halt airports (im sure this will be remedied soon)...imagine how vulnerable trains are to domestic terrorism- do you really think it would be easy to secure hundreds of miles of rail? It's a lot easier to secure an airport I assure you.

Airports are also much more vulnerable to terrorism. An airport gets shut down if a drone is nearby because a drone going into an engine could be catastrophic (unlikely, but possible). A train hitting a drone just obliterates the drone and keeps going. Once you're talking about the level of organization and resources required to make a meaningful threat to the rail system it's almost certainly going to be more effective to get a bunch of AR-15s and start shooting into crowds.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ouze wrote:
I don't think it's at all obvious that America needs this.

Flight time between New York to Los Angeles is what, eight or nine hours? What would it be via HSR, twice that? I'm not clear on the argument for spending an enormous outlay to build a train system that's going to be twice as slow, at best, as what we have now.

What are the exact arguments in favor of this?

The primary argument, from a customer point of view, is the increase in comfort. A train doesn't have the same weight and space constraints of a plane and therefore doesn't have the same pressure to pack in passengers as densely as possible. So the comparison might be 8-9 hours from NYC to LA by plane in a tiny seat with expensive "food", or 16-18 hours in a much more comfortable seat with real food, more ability to get up and walk around, no bag fees, etc. Or for more money, far less than the cost of the equivalent service on an airline flight (if it even exists on domestic routes), you can get a private cabin with a bed and treat the travel as an overnight hotel stay. Is this a viable business model? I don't know, the airline industry has pretty consistently demonstrated that passengers don't care about the quality of their travel experience as long as it means cheaper tickets. But there's definitely a potential advantage to high speed rail.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
I don't think it's at all obvious that America needs this.

Flight time between New York to Los Angeles is what, eight or nine hours? What would it be via HSR, twice that? I'm not clear on the argument for spending an enormous outlay to build a train system that's going to be twice as slow, at best, as what we have now.

What are the exact arguments in favor of this?

The primary argument, from a customer point of view, is the increase in comfort. A train doesn't have the same weight and space constraints of a plane and therefore doesn't have the same pressure to pack in passengers as densely as possible. So the comparison might be 8-9 hours from NYC to LA by plane in a tiny seat with expensive "food", or 16-18 hours in a much more comfortable seat with real food, more ability to get up and walk around, no bag fees, etc. Or for more money, far less than the cost of the equivalent service on an airline flight (if it even exists on domestic routes), you can get a private cabin with a bed and treat the travel as an overnight hotel stay. Is this a viable business model? I don't know, the airline industry has pretty consistently demonstrated that passengers don't care about the quality of their travel experience as long as it means cheaper tickets. But there's definitely a potential advantage to high speed rail.

Yeah, I think that last part is the big takeaway. I wish I could pull the exact quote, but it was some airline CEO saying they had made capital investments in upholstery and so on, but none of that matters because the passengers will always pick the tickets that cost a buck less. It's a race to the bottom that apparently has no bottom, as Ryanair keeps showing.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Yes I was concerned that "duh terrists" would be one issue people would have.

Not even terrorists per se. If I recall on this very forum there was a thread about a month or so ago about thousands upon thousands of passengers stranded at an airport in England for days because maybe there was a drone spotted.

I think regional rail is a good idea and the conversation needs to shift to that a bit.

 Excommunicatus wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
Yup. You could have a HSR line up the east coast, that's about it. As countries go, the USA is insanely big and spread out.

It's not even the biggest country in North America.

Yeah but Canada is mostly uninhabited, relatively speaking. Most of the USA is reasonably inhabitable.

I do think there could be some use linking cities down the east coast. The big cites are spaced out where it’s a bit long to drive, but seems a waste to go through the hassle of flying. I know I’ve taken the train from Albany to New York City a few times. Lovely ride down the Hudson River, relaxing, nice view, much better than being groped by TSA, crammed in a tube and hurled through the air. And once you get to the city, you don’t need to deal with parking, traffic, etc. And if you factor in the cost of parking your car in the city, gas, etc, the price is quite reasonable.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Yes I was concerned that "duh terrists" would be one issue people would have.

Not meaningfully. Rail attacks would be less effective than intelligent attacks on airports (not airplanes, airports). They'd get less people and disrupt less.
We've been rather lucky so far, to be honest. I know my regional airport literally has a security hole you could drive a truck through. (Seriously, they left the back gate open all winter, anyone passing by could have driven in, loaded whatever on to a plane and gone before responders could get there, and then its a short flight to half-a-dozen major airports, where they could play out Die Hard 2)

Would there ever be room for a middle-ground type of train? Something that isn't necessarily the 200MPH high-speed train, but something that is faster than the 50mph passenger trains we currently have. Perhaps something that tops out around 110mph?

If we are talking about regional hubs on the east coast, I think something like that would make more sense. It would be significantly cheaper than a full-on high speed railway and more of the existing lines could be converted.

 Ouze wrote:
I don't think it's at all obvious that America needs this.

Flight time between New York to Los Angeles is what, eight or nine hours? What would it be via HSR, twice that? I'm not clear on the argument for spending an enormous outlay to build a train system that's going to be twice as slow, at best, as what we have now.



What are the exact arguments in favor of this?

Less oil consumption (HSR can be electrified and usually is to save weight) and less air pollution.

Avoiding Insecurity Drama Theater.

Being a good option for those afraid of flying.

Those are the big ones that come to mind.

If it's handled like Amtrak, being able to get your own little room and eat actual cooked food instead of bad TV dinners would also be nice. Even the basic seats on Amtrak give you more room to stretch out than anything short of First Class on an airliner. And you are allowed, nay, encouraged to get up and walk around periodically on a train.

 cuda1179 wrote:
Would there ever be room for a middle-ground type of train? Something that isn't necessarily the 200MPH high-speed train, but something that is faster than the 50mph passenger trains we currently have. Perhaps something that tops out around 110mph?

Something like the ICE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercity-Express)?

 Vulcan wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
I don't think it's at all obvious that America needs this.

Flight time between New York to Los Angeles is what, eight or nine hours? What would it be via HSR, twice that? I'm not clear on the argument for spending an enormous outlay to build a train system that's going to be twice as slow, at best, as what we have now.



What are the exact arguments in favor of this?

Less oil consumption (HSR can be electrified and usually is to save weight) and less air pollution.

Avoiding Insecurity Drama Theater.

Being a good option for those afraid of flying.

Those are the big ones that come to mind.

If it's handled like Amtrak, being able to get your own little room and eat actual cooked food instead of bad TV dinners would also be nice. Even the basic seats on Amtrak give you more room to stretch out than anything short of First Class on an airliner. And you are allowed, nay, encouraged to get up and walk around periodically on a train.

Sure. Trains are more comfortable for the passengers than airplanes.

The problem is that the government would have to prop up the train's finances for years until it had enough of a customer base to sustain itself. And even then the ridership would probably tank as ticket prices soared due to walking back any subsidies. And this is after the government would have put trillions into actually building the railroad. CA has already spent $5.4 billion on high speed rail, with literally no progress at all.