Fair enough. What about China? Or many of the other countries that have developed a decent high speed rail network?
Almost all of those other countries have their two largest cities (making up more than 20% of their national population) sitting less than 300 miles from each other. In Europe, the only exceptions are Russia (Moscow-St. Petersburg are about 400 miles) and Spain (Madrid-Barcelona are about 315 miles). Every other country has their two largest cities comfortably under 300 miles apart. Because their countries are smaller and their populations are “spikier,” with a vastly higher proportion of their population living in their single largest city than U.S. residents living in NYC. The geography and demographics make HSR very practical.
China is different, it’s true - it’s huge and has a bunch of populous cities that are far from each other, like us. But China doesn’t have a representative democratic government. It doesn’t have to be able to justify a particular governmental expenditure to the citizenry. That’s why I also noted our form of government as something that makes HSR difficult to achieve here in the U.S. We’re democratic (which makes the low population in any given city pair an obstacle) and a federal republic (any given city pair is a large part of a state population, but a small part of the national population).
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As in almost 3,000 miles.
And, as noted upthread, our cities are laid out differently. Look at Los Angeles. (definitely not a European layout). Let’s say you live in Sierra Madra, a suburb next to Pasadena, and you wanted to visit your friend jaagu who lives in Petaluma north of San Francisco. Now this is a two or three decades in the future when the California high-speed rail project might be actually running.
You have a couple of transportation options, since (IIRC) “short-range” intra-state flights may be banned in California.
- You can rent or use your own FSD EV to go doorstep to doorstep. No fuss, no muss, you can use your time in the car to work, relax, etc.
- You can use your vehicle or call an Uber-equvialent to take you south to the light rail Gold Line in Pasadena. After hauling your bags to the platform and waiting for the next train you go to downtown LA. There you take your bags to the high-speed rail train (if it’s close) and wait for the next train north. If the high-speed rail line actually goes to downtown San Francisco (currently plans are for a train transfer) you take you bags with you and get an Uber-equivalent to carry you across the Golden Gate Bridge and then north to Petaluma.
The various future travel times are unknown at this point, but autonomous driving is going to be a killer for rail transport except for those who live/work downtown.
DB2
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Maybe. The problem with that scenario is time. Drive time from Sierra Madre to Petaluma is going to be about six hours. If you took an uber from your house to the LA train station, HSR to SF, and an uber to Petaluma, you’ll probably shave about 2.5 to 3 hours off that travel time. For a single rider it will undoubtedly be cheaper to take the train as well. 400+ miles is just really far for driving to compare well against HSR. Maybe autonomy will increase speeds a bit, but probably not by enough to matter.
Where auto technology is going to hurt HSR is probably not with autonomy, but with electrification in Europe. As noted above, major European cities are closer to each other than major cities in the U.S. Rail transport is very competitive against driving between those cities, though, because fuel costs are very high. Petrol costs are close to $0.30 per mile in Europe. Compare that with $0.13 per mile for ICE cars in the U.S., and only about $0.05 per mile for EV costs in Europe (home charging).
Rail doesn’t face a lot of competition from driving at the lower distance end (below <200 miles) because fewer Europeans have cars and it costs so much to drive them. But EV’s are likely to change that. They’ll increase car ownership and increase the proportion of folks choosing to drive between close city-pairs (like, say, Rome-Florence) rather than use rail. Autonomy is the icing on that cake (it makes a longer trip more enjoyable), but it’s the electrification that will cause real mode shifts.
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The tech begging to be used is is that of cooperating communicating autonomous vehicles traveling at high speeds on specialized lanes of highways as TRAINS. Normalmprivate cars waste a lot of energy on individually pushing air aside in the front and being sucked backward at their rear.
Is it? From what I could gather from a quick google, such a train would reduce fuel expenditure by only about 10-15% for passenger cars. But EV passenger cars only cost about $0.04-0.06 per mile anyway, so reducing that by even 15% is barely a penny per mile. That hardly seems like it would justify the infrastructure and operational expense of doing something like this.
Maybe for trucks, which have worse aerodynamics and have higher fuel costs per mile. But it doesn’t seem like this would make sense for passenger cars.
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Yeah, I get that. But the US has lots of “city pairs”, they’re just not all in the same state.
Los Angeles/Las Vegas
Houston/Dallas*
Austin/Dallas*
New York./Boston
New York/Washington
Miami/Orlando
New York/Philadelphia
WashingtonDC/Baltimore
Chicago/Milwaukee
Chicago/Indianapolis
Cleveland/Pittsburgh
Cleveland/Detroit
Atlanta/Charlotte
Atlanta/Nashville/Knoxville/Memphis
Los Angeles/San Diego
Los Angeles/Sacramento
And those are just the ones I can think of sitting here at the keyboard. And yes, there is air service between many of them, although in a couple of cases you have to fly to a hub and then back out, which makes the trip an all day affair. (I live in one of those non-hub cities, and it’s a pain.)
There are times when being late to the party is an advantage, as when you set up a cellular phone system without the expense or need to string wires to every single household. It’s incredibly less expensive to do that as a latecomer. On the other hand, because we have air service to most places, we have a disincentive to invest in HSR, simply because the capital cost is high, the timetable unknown, and the competition can keep it from becoming self sufficient. In this case, being late is a category killer. (China, by contrast, had poor air service, an incentive to prioritize some sort of transport system which turned out to be rail. And yes, the diminution of competing political interests was huge - but even countries with fierce politics have managed to do it - and to interconnect with other countries.)
I suspect we will NEVER have high speed rail here. Too far, too much angst, too many established competitors, too much politics, too costly, Mores the pity, I think.
Of course. But I don’t think my point came through clearly. It’s not that these city-pairs don’t exist. It’s that they have too small a proportion of the national population. (Among other issues).
When you put rail between the two largest urban centers in any given European country, more than 20% of the national population will live in those two metros. One will almost certainly be the national capital, and it’s very likely that a very large proportion of the folks who don’t live in those cities will travel to one or both in any given year. It’s easy to justify the national investment in the infrastructure.
That’s not true of cities like Houston/Dallas, or Chicago/Indy. Not even 5% of the national population lives in either of those city pairs, and the overwhelming majority of Americans aren’t likely to go to either of them. And obviously none of those cities is the national capitol. It makes it really hard for that infrastructure to get through the national appropriations and funding processes. Especially given the somewhat unique structure of our bicameral Legislature - rail funding for any given city pair will need to get through a U.S. Senate where 90% or more of the members represent states that would not directly benefit, a significant structural obstacle not present in most other countries.
And again, HSR doesn’t make sense for most of those city pairs. Many of them are just too close together for rail to be competitive with driving - indeed, most of them are less than 200 miles apart. Because the U.S. has very low-density cities and very high rates of car ownership, that’s enough to make HSR unworkable. You’re never going to be able to make Cleveland-Pittsburgh or Chicago-Milwaukee an attractive alternative to driving for enough people for the systems to be viable.
There are only a handful of city-pairs that have sufficient combined population and distance from each other that HSR could theoretically make sense. That would be Houston-DFW, LA-Vegas, and NY to Boston or DC (because the heavy traffic makes the drive times longer). But each have major problems. Houston and Dallas are among the least dense cities in the country, which makes rail materially less convenient: your trip origination and trip destination are vastly more likely to be a considerable distance from the city center where the train stations are going to be. Which pushes people towards driving.
The Bos-Wash corridor doesn’t have that problem, but it’s also served by a ton of low speed rail and it’s got just too much density throughout the region. Demographically, it’s almost more like one huge single city than four separate cities - which makes it hard to justify the “express” service as a separate HSR platform rather than serving the many millions of people who live between those cities. LA-LV is perhaps the only possible one, which is why it’s not a surprise that it’s the only one that there’s an actual possible private project moving forward.
But that’s a good thing. We have alternatives that work better - air travel for longer distances, and driving for shorter distances. It’s not bad that we have well-developed transportation options that meet most people’s travel needs better than HSR, and therefore make HSR a solution in search of a problem.
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The reason is NOT cost reduction (although that is helpful), but rather a means to radically increase speed and carrying capacity without much increase in danger.
How relevant is that for passenger cars, though? Carrying capacity doesn’t seem like a factor at all. And realistically, how much would you be able to increase their speed?
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Doubling speed ought be possible, and (having personally made the round trip from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley over 100 times in my life) could be a huge advance with lots of customers.
Is it, though? To get the aerodynamic benefits, the following cars will need to be very close to the cars ahead. Even if the decision-making “driver” in the autonomous car is instantaneous, and the proper choice is communicated to the cars immediately, would the cars be physically able to respond to something going wrong if travelling at that speed?
I don’t know. If you have a bunch of passenger cars travelling at 150 mph and only separated by ten feet or so, and one car has a tire blow out, at some point you’re oustripping your stopping distance no matter how instantaneous the instruction to hit the brakes gets communicated to the cars.
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As I mentioned previously, that would be the hard way (i.e. smuggling something on a train). The easy way is to blow up a section of track somewhere between point A and point B. The train hits it, and derails.
Air travel, you pretty much can’t do that unless you have a SAM. But a HSR from PHX to LA, pick some place in the middle of the desert and somehow break the rail (bomb, cutting torch, whatever). So, a TSA system would be pretty much superfluous unless/until you can monitor all that track and stop the train reliably.
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How about flying drones ahead of the trains to verify the track is OK
Mike
Autonomy will NOT increase speeds very much. That’s because the faster you go, the more energy you consume, and what good is a fast autonomous vehicle if you have to stop every ~150 miles to switch into a different [freshly charged] autonomous vehicle?
And even if they do go at much higher speeds, it means that many more autonomous vehicles will have to be available at any given time because more of them are charging at any given time.
If you’re driving city-to-city in Europe, most likely only one leg can use the cheap home charging. The way back will usually have to use more expensive fast charging.
The politics is a HUGE reason why it’ll never happen. For example, even with existing rail solutions, politics often doesn’t allow the terminal station to be anywhere in, of often even near, the center of town. That means that the average person has to travel, say 30 minutes (if no traffic) to the rail station, has to park somewhere (and pay), needs to allow at least an extra 15 minutes to be sure to make the train, and then probably the same thing on the other side at the destination terminal that isn’t quite in/near the center of town. Take BrightLine for example, their terminal in Orlando is essentially useless because it is at the airport! And that is not all that close to the city of Orlando. One of my kids took it once when visiting UCF and it was kind of a pain to get from the BrightLine Terminal to the college.
The High-Speed Rail Authority “will exhaust its current funding resources as soon as December 2027 if it does not secure financing,” Inspector General Ben Belnap’s office found, warning the authority faces a $9.5 billion funding gap over five years. The borrowing needed to fill it could add $3.6 billion to $6.6 billion in interest costs — money not included in the project’s official cost estimate.
The warning comes as a CBS California Investigation revealed the authority repeatedly missed its deadlines to buy the trains at the center of a $4 billion federal funding fight — deadlines written into its federal grant agreement and promised to a federal judge — then quietly dropped its lawsuit against the Trump administration weeks after missing its own revised deadline.
DB2
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I came across this video 2 weeks ago analyzing the 150 mile trip between Portland and Seattle. There’s only a 10 minute difference in time between an Amtrak train with the average speed of a passenger car on Interstate 5, and an airliner when you add in the time to get to the airport and deal with TSA. Plus the train gives you a 2-1/2 hour block of uninterrupted time to get some work done in an expansive seat with a table versus 27 minutes in the air in a cramped, regional airliner.
Amtrak Cascades is getting some new rolling stock in the coming months.
intercst
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Yeah, if you’re measuring time from downtown to downtown - and start your trip in downtown instead of somewhere else. And use transit to get between downtown and the airport. Resulting in an extra 70 minutes of travel to and from the station in the plane scenario. But if you don’t happen to be starting right next to the train station, or using something a little quicker than transit to get to and from the airport, so that it takes you roughly the same time to get to either the train station or airport, flying will save you close to two hours.
But the real competition for rail for trips of 150-200 miles isn’t air, it’s driving. Sure, if you’re trying to go from a major metro downtown to another major metro downtown during peak times, that might take longer - but not as long as 4 hrs 49 min for Amtrak here, and vastly shorter for nearly other pair of trip ends.
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I guess not everybody in California is positive on the high speed rail line.
California’s beleaguered, over-budget high-speed rail line now has one more thing to worry about: A city and housing developer wants to build homes right in the train’s projected path.
Shafter, a city near Bakersfield, and developer Lennar Homes are plowing ahead with 1,200 homes in the same area off Highway 99 where the state’s rail authority plans to build tracks…
Any actual construction of the rail in Shafter is likely a long ways off.
DB2
We already know that not everyone favors rail, especially in the US. Not a newsflash, Bob.
That said, it is interesting (from a legal perspective) how this may (or may not) occur. I’m assuming whomever (the State?) is overseeing the rail will file an injunction to halt such activities.
And then, if that fails, if the project continues, will all those homes be condemned in the future to make way for the rail? I would think that this possibility would have to be spelled out in the disclosures to the new home buyers (“Hey, your new home is in the planned path for a rail project, and could be condemned at some point.”).
If albaby is around, since he’s a real estate lawyer, I’d be interested in his take.
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