I think the fears that are keeping people off airplanes are also going to keep them off high speed trains.
I am dreading New York City reopening because everyone is just going to drive to the city instead of taking public transportation. And it was already overrun with cars.
Raise tolls, promote remote work unless you absolutely need to be in the city. Use economic incentives to destroy demand for unnecessary vehicular travel.
I am with you, but we don't have infrastructure for toll collection on most of the East River bridges, so there isn't an easy answer here. (A lot of the traffic on the East River bridges is trucks that are simply avoiding the more direct tolled truck routes. It's unfortunate that CO2 emissions are cheaper than tolls, but here we are. I live in Brooklyn Heights which is walking distance to Manhattan modulo a big river in the middle, and I know my neighbors are just going to start driving to work when things reopen. It is going to be a mess.)
London managed it with congestion charges, and it is not an island with limited entry/exit points. No toll booths required: it is doable within a reasonable timeframe.
Why is that? Bailing out Boeing every now and then is almost certainly cheaper than bailing out a rail operator to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every year, and still having them teeter on the verge of insolvency: https://skift.com/2018/03/05/frances-rail-system-is-falling-...
> Underused stations on expensive tracks are one of the many reasons France’s vaunted rail system is insolvent, subsisting on life support from the state. Rail operator SNCF runs an annual deficit of 3 billion euros despite receiving 14 billion euros of public subsidies annually—just under half the defense budget. Its debt, at 45 billion euros, equals the national debt of New Zealand.
It's important to point out that it's low speed, aging infrastructure that's a big problem for French rail. Bullet trains make a lot of money and in general people complain because as a result the SNCF invests a lot more into the high-speed infrastructure than to maintain the old, slow, regional lines.
The high-speed axes like Paris<->Marseille or the Paris<->Bordeaux are definitely not underused and the tickets are quite expensive, often more so than plane tickets but trains are generally a lot more comfortable and convenient (and about as fast or even faster door-to-door).
More broadly the problem is whether you consider that the SNCF should be run uniquely for-profit (in which case they'd probably end up closing all the small regional lines and only run the bullet trains) or if it's a public service that can lose money if it provides an important service for the citizens (in which case it makes sense to maintain the local lines even if they lose a lot of money).
Uh, please stop downvoting rayiner. He didn't say anything wrong or kooky, on the contrary he provided an interesting, substantiated counter-point not often heard around these parts. Do you people _want_ HN to become an even worse echochamber?
Secondly, it makes it hard for me to read because it's light-colored text on light background. So knock it off.
It's probably for the best. Would have costed 10x as much as trains in other countries at 1/4-1/3 the speed. You're paying for a lamborghini and getting a honda civic, and you won't get it for a decade.
Perhaps. I recall articles about how expensive NYC Subway projects are...
OTOH how much more expensive is running international aiports, airplanes, and jet fuel?
Plus flying sucks, even at the business and first class. Amtrack wasn't amazing but I had way more seat space with a basic ticket and didn't have to get irradiated and searched just to get on a plane.
Couple of years ago when someone was arguing with my about high speed rail a Brit piped up with how much it'd cost to build third runway at Heathrow. Something like $12 to $15 billion. Which is what convinced me the California High Speed rail a good idea. Build that and you don't need to expand about 8-12 airports.
I want high speed trains as much as the next person, but they don’t work for the United States in the same way that flying does.
High speed rail would work on the coasts and in specific intercity regions. There most definitely should be high speed rail between nearby large cities - Texas, the Midwest, and California could really use high speed rail systems.
But the lack of these routes aren’t necessarily a disaster at present, especially when Americans generally need a car at their destination anyway (thanks to irreversible city planning from the past).
What high speed rail can never compete with are flights across the huge country.
The world’s largest high speed rail network in China doesn’t have to deal with United States sized distances. All Chinese cities are relatively close to the eastern coast.
And all Chinese cities are easy to traverse and live in without owning a car. The whole concept of the automobile-based single family home detached suburb doesn’t exist there.
Even with these advantages, a high speed train from Beijing to Shanghai (about 5 hours) barely competes with a flight on a low cost airline. It’s slower and not even very much cheaper.
Beijing to Shanghai is about 640 miles by plane. That distance wouldn’t even get you from New York to Chicago. Now imagine trying to get from New York to Orlando (940 miles) or Denver (1600 miles).
A high speed train simply can’t go fast enough to compete on price nor time (remember: more time in transit means more salaries paid to crew).
Train beats airplanes by other factors e.g. easy transition to subways so people spend much less time going to the train station than airports; also airplane especially the cheap ones tend to delay for X hours without notice while trains are usually on time. Also trains are much more comfortable.
I will second this and also add that I think there are unlockable network effects that happen when economic activity can be more dense across the country vs. a few large metropolitan areas. Of course they could use some public transit as well.
I totally agree with you. The problem is, how do you undo a half century of city planning, especially when McMansions and subdivisions continue to sprawl to this day?
Realistically, you can’t - not quickly at least, and furthermore you’ve got a whole population of people that is used to this lifestyle.
So I’m just evaluating (in my opinion) the prospects of high speed rail based on what we have right now. I think if it was a slam-dunk no brainer economic activity and tax revenue generator, it would have been done already.
I respect your opinion, I think that it's something that takes investment before economic activity is seen. Like many startups spending venture capital to build a network that doesn't turn a profit until it's scaled to a certain size, rail builds economies around it where it is. A lot of boom towns in the early 20th century were a result of a railway moving through the town. Hotels, restaurants, shops, etc were built by rail towns. It provides a physical conduit of currency and importantly freight moving around the country (but until I have sources up, this is my opinion).
I agree that those factors can beat airplane travel, but none of them really outweigh travel time in practice.
For subway connections, there is no physical limitation preventing local transit from connecting to the airport. Cities of varying sizes have direct connections to local transit (e.g. Chicago, Fort Worth, Cleveland). The fact that New York City got this so very wrong is an outlier. And finally, subway connection is irrelevant to the bulk of American cities that are car dependent. Having a high speed train arriving in Columbus, Ohio won’t fix the fact that you need to rent a car or Uber everywhere once you get there (to the point where, if you’re within a ~6 hour drive, you’re probably better off just driving your own car that you likely already own).
Flight delay problems are overblown and dramatized, most flights are on time. Trains can most certainly be delayed as well (usually not as frequently, sure - depends heavily on the train system).
Thing is, a flight to LA from New York could be delayed for hours and hours and it would still beat the train.
The hardest part about building a railway is the land-rights. You need a straight path from A->B, wide enough for at least two lines and fence. But once you have that then re-using that corridor as railway technology improves is very cheap proportionately (e.g. train densities, train speeds, etc).
The problem is that no generation wants to take on the initial "buy in," even if it gets more and more expensive as time goes on (since there's more property/interested parties along the route).
The problem is that politics are so corrupt/inefficient in the US that the projects go 4x over budget/time with no consequences for the politicians/bureaucrats/contractors who let things like this happen.
Just look at the Honolulu Rapid Transit Projects and California High Speed Rail projects.
The overruns in California (relative to European norms) have been attributed to: Higher property prices, mountain ranges, and legal challenges (from property owners, environmental groups, and so on).
If you have specific information on "corruption" then you can update the Wikipedia article on the project here:
Even ignoring the "expected" inflation of costs. IMO the bottom line with California HSR is it would require far more tunneling than is feasible to construct. They studied it extensively, and LA-SF high speed rail just didn't make sense.
Maybe so, maybe not, but what's the relevance? We're discussing something generally transportation-related, so let's discuss trains vs. planes too now?
It seems like you're trying to make a connection here, but it's not clear what it would be.
