This proposal seems totally disconnected from reality.
First, Amtrak is not a competitive transportation option. It can be a fun novelty, but it's expensive and slow. Going from Portland to Oakland is supposed to take 18 hours but actually took 20 when I rode it. The same trip in a car takes 10 hours. By plane is 90 minutes. It gets worse: Amtrak cost me more than a plane ticket to the same destination.
Second, hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't get you much train in the US. California tried to build a high speed rail route between SF and LA. The estimated completion cost has skyrocketed to $100 billion and the completion date is 25 years after voters approved the project. The state has since given up on connecting LA & SF by high speed rail.
There is simply no future in which passenger rail competes with air travel in the US. Even in circumstances where the distances are not too great, and the political and bureaucratic hurdles are.
> Even in circumstances where the distances are not too great, and the political and bureaucratic hurdles are.
NIMBY-ism as well? Because I can't fathom how a 400 miles high-speed rail route can cost $100bn unless you're spending years re-drafting your route because every asshole on the way has to be heard.
25 years is not completely nonsensical though, if you want to do this right it does take time.
For a fairly recent example, the french LGV Est is 252 miles (406km), it cost 4bn (including 800 millions worth of rolling stock), and took 16 years before the construction and financing protocol of the first phase was signed and the opening of the second phase. First phase opened a year late, and second phase 3 months late because of the Eckwersheim testing accident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckwersheim_derailment).
Obviously building in California would require additional studies and expenses for earthquake safety and the like, but 12x… seems a bit much.
The cost only makes sense if it's basically all tunnels and briges, like Chūō Shinkansen: that's estimated to cost north of $90 billion for 177 miles, but it's going straight through mountains, 90% of the way is through tunnels.
The longer we wait to do rail right the more expensive it gets because of NIMBY-ism and property ownership. We need to do it now.
Trains are slower in some cases, but the views you simply cannot get from a plane or car.
You can work on a train.
You can get a private cab.
You can get up and move around.
You can go to the viewing car and see the beauty of America.
You can't do any of that in a plane or car. It is traveling in a much better way, even if longer.
Take the Southwest Chief from Flagstaff to Colorado routes and you'd be amazed at how pretty New Mexico is, the deserts of Arizona and the mountains in Colorado. Take any of the coastal lines. You will simply be blown away.
The great thing about trains or infrastructure like fiber across America maybe, people will see govt/business in action. It will build platforms of market value that people can see, people in small towns, people all around.
People need visuals just like clients need visuals to see progress, even though lots of the work is not visible maybe in code or other areas.
The time to train is now. In a way it is the last chance to really get it going before everything is full.
We have been robbed of amazing train rides and views. Take any of these routes/lines and tell me you don't enjoy the views. [1]
Before you vote on anything related to trains, go take one on our underfunded Amtrak routes. It will change your mind if you are not for it. Imagine if we did this right.
Trains use much less fuel, help make pricing for cars/planes competitive and more. Having a third major transportation option besides a bus is needed as we get more packed in.
The view from a train might be marginally nicer, but when I travel it's usually because I want to be somewhere else. Not because I want to sit for hours and watch the scenery go by.
But do you want to spend 1hr getting to the airport, then waiting 2+ Hours to board the plane, wait for air traffic control, taxi, etc and then repeat on the other side? It takes five to six hours to go from SF to LA about the same as it takes to drive. A train would be far better.
Not to mention getting groped and treated like a terrorist by TSA staff. Or paying through your nose for baggage, with the added privilege of carriers regularly losing your stuff.
Expecting nothing good to come from NA, I fully expect the US would follow Canada in making domestic train as inconvenient as planes, including weighting luggage & shitty boarding.
The fact that the train takes 18hrs is a political decision. In Japan, the same train over the same distance, often with even more torturous landscape and crowed infrastructure, takes 3hrs.
Yes there was a time where you could go to the airport, buy a ticket, and just walk on to the plane. You didn't need to spend hours going through ceremonial activity. And on the plane, you had confortable seats, you could get up and walk around, some airplanes even had a lounge in the back where you could get a drink and socialize. 9/11, and the fact that passengers will seemingly sacrifice all comfort to save a dollar on the fare ended all that.
One question I have on this - if rail travel became more ubiquitous, would it become a more enticing target for malevolent actors and/or a higher priority for security screenings, etc? We marvel at how easy it is to walk on a train today, but would that change / how might it change if rail carried a more significant portion of travelers?
Amtrak already does some screening and they increased their security like all others did from rental cars to busses to trains to planes. However the nature of flying has a much higher reach in terms of potential damage which was realized on 9/11 really.
Trains are less of a threat. Attackers can only really cause damage on a train to a section and maybe a derailment.
Plane terrorism is broader. With a plane everyone is at risk and the plane could be used to attack other things.
Train terrorism is limited. A train can't be taken off course. A train can't be all blown up. Even a massive derailment only affects a section. An attack would be a tragedy but it has rails so to speak on the reach of the damage. Maybe if they blew it up over a bridge or by a building in a city it could cause more damage or some other trigger like causing another disaster. You to have the threat of people setting explosives on the track. There was one of those in 1995 in Arizona where 1 died and 78 were injured, supposedly the attackers were avenging the Waco Siege. [1] Looks like that is the only terrorism event on trains in the US. [2] Subways and metros are probably more targeted in the city.
I used to fly twice a month, SF<->DC, before 9/11, the seats in economy were not comfortable, and there were no lounges on domestic flights. Maybe in first class, but domestic first class usually is little more than slightly better seats.
This is no way in comparison to train travel. There's no "dining car" on the train. There's no tables for business meetings. There's no 2 to 4 bathrooms per car. Sleeper rooms are much cheaper and accessible than on planes, but sure, you can pay a multiple of $10k for a room on beyond-first-class international flights.
But even if I granted you that in the old days, you could show up 30 minutes before the flight, walk pretty much straight to the gate, you're still ignoring much more time spent getting to the airport, and time spent waiting for takeoff and baggage loading/unloading.
Major airports are generally located outside cities and near water if possible, train stations are usually located in the heart of the metro area. Sure, there are exceptions like Las Vegas, but in general, most people have to spent 45mins-1hr just getting to the airport in the US.
No one's saying you should use train travel for DC to SF. But come on, NYC to DC, or SF to LA is a no-fucking brainer. When you drive from SF to LA, most of Route-5 is straight land on wild open, flat prairie, and the main difficulty is when you hit the mountain range past Bakersfield, which every advanced country, be it the French, Swiss, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, already deal with, on far more harsh terrain.
There's zero excuse for the opposition to high speed rail for regional intercity, except for a stubborn, weirdly political opposition to trains, which George Will kind of outlined (accidentally) in a piece attacking trains as "socialist" but somehow air travel as "non-socialist" despite the fact that the Feds and States have funded aviation infrastructure to the tune of hundreds of billions over the decades.
Except for the driver. I am petrified of driving in a group at the serious risk of distracting the driver. And driverless car is very far off from reality. Till then trains it is for me.
Second this ... I've been commuting for about 84 km each way each day for five years ... in Germany with the regional trains that took me about 1.5h (and only 40 minutes of that were actual train ride).
In that time I would start to work (on the clock), just "sleep in" or work on hobby projects.
In the same time a friend of mine in the bay area manages to travel 20 km to the office.
As much as I hated commuting ... I'd take commuting by train over commuting by car every day.
> Take the Southwest Chief from Flagstaff to Colorado routes and you'd be amazed at how pretty New Mexico is, the deserts of Arizona and the mountains in Colorado.
I think it leaves Flagstaff really early in the morning - and it's not worth mentioning Flagstaff to LA or LA to Flagstaff because those trips are only scheduled for the middle of the night.
When I took it, it was early morning Flagstaff (6AM) into Trinidad by later that day (5PM). Going through Navajo lands, then New Mexico, then Colorado coal areas and then beautiful mountains was amazing. It gives you lots of perspective.
They could run them more with more routes and funding. On the way back to Flagstaff it was later so maybe they already have some additional times.
It would be nice to see LA sections during the day. But that is another benefit really, you can sleep easier on a train than you can on a plane or car, especially with a private room/car.
Railroads (particularly high speed) need to be long and straight. What happens if people don't want a dozen trains roaring through their neighborhood every day? It's difficult to just go around it.
What happens if people don't want a railroad through their property at all? After all, once a railroad is sitting on your land, it's difficult to repurpose it for much else. The state can try eminent domain, but that takes time and lengthy court cases, and the costs add up quick.
The best routes already have railroads. Their right of ways are in private hands.
To put it in perspective, the only all season transcontinental route is the southern most line on the article’s map. It only exists by virtue of the Gadsden Purchase in 1854. The right of way is controlled by the corporate successors of the Southern Pacific.
The non-existence of viable alternative all season grades across the west is why the Gadsden Purchase happened. The US had assumed surely such routes existed in Alta California following its succession in 1848 via the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
>Because I can't fathom how a 400 miles high-speed rail route can cost $100bn unless you're spending years re-drafting your route because every asshole on the way has to be heard.
That's exactly what happens. Not because of NIMBYism but because it's run by consultants on cost plus, T&M, or percentage contracts. They have no incentive to finish the project. And in fact are financially rewarded for making the project more expensive.
The LGV route is a far more open and "flatter" (relatively speaking) than LA to SF. There's way less for them to tunnel or grade, which gets expensive quickly. HSR requires more gentle changes in direction than traditional rail. Building on flat, open terrain that no one is using is great... but that kind of terrain is already in use or owned by someone. Thus, easements or having to outright purchase the land. If not and you go for cheap land, it's going to come with downsides, like being mountainous.
At that, France sees less than 10 earthquake events over 2 magnitude a year on average. In the past week, there were already 6 events over 2 magnitude between LA and SF alone: https://www.cisn.org/map/index.html An LA to SF line is practically on a fault line. Devastating earthquakes are a real reality for a Cali line, not so much for France. The Cali standards for building rail are going to be higher than France, and for EXTREMELY good reason. Thus, price goes up for construction.
There's a lot more at play to building these things. What I mentioned barely scratches the surface to the complications. Claiming NIMBY is pretty naive if you don't take into consideration the real world problems and needs to achieving something compared to the lofty, idealistic wants of a project.
The portion of the CAHSR system being built right now is flatter and more open than most of France, and isn't on or near any of the major fault lines in California. Its outrageous expense has nothing to do with the geographical challenges of California (which are real, but not for this segment) and everything to do with the incompetence of the construction companies and their governmental overseers, as well as NIMBYs exacerbating these problems to epic degrees.
Sunshine bear, check out the menu on that link. Hit load all from the past week. Next, search the LA to SF proposed HSR route. There were 2 dozen earthquakes along the route between 1-2.5mag and 1 at 2.5mag in the last week. The route was hit by more seismic events in one week than France experiences in a year. Yes, they are planning for earthquakes, as they should. It will be hit one day, in the next decade or so by a large event, and should be well prepared for it. The same way how many states are enacting building codes to reflect 100 year flood statistics instead of treating them as rare events. Long term projects need long term expectations of problems and methods to overcome them. You can't just replace rail like you replace your iPhone. This will inevitably cost them more per mile compared to France. That's actually an very intelligent move to make regarding long term infrastructure.
It's funny how the same complaints tech folks make of the construction industry are in parallel with what construction folks say of the tech industry. Both are based off ignorance. I have the pleasant curse of having a foot in both fields.
Real world construction is far more complex and difficult than what you imagine. Wide sweeping statements like, "incompetence of the construction companies and their governmental overseers" stinks of you having an cartoonish armchair understanding of what it actual takes from visualized computer renders to a real standing structure. Because civil engineering in the modern age has been a total failure, har har har. Honestly, it's people like you that are easily persuaded to vote for abolishing OSHA on the grounds to hasten construction times and lower costs. Because guess what, Cali construction costs are pretty high due to safety regulations. This is where... oh God forgive me for saying this... I agree with a lot of Cali construction code even though it can be excessive at times, it's warranted a lot of time. Especially because some of it is set for their specific region's character of obstacles... almost like local authorities know best and should enact laws how to construct depending on their local area's nuances! They shouldn't base their construction methods on regions from the other side of the planet!
You seem to be quite knowledgeable on the subject, so let me ask you a question: Is LA to SF is less open and flat, and less seismically active than Tokyo-Kanazawa line? I honestly don't know the answer, but the contrast between Japan (has very nice subway and bullet train lines) and California (can't even go to the grocery store without a car) is quite striking to me every time I visit.
>I can't fathom how a 400 miles high-speed rail route can cost $100bn
In the Seattle metro area, about 100 miles of low-speed light rail has cost $75.5 billion so far. Building infrastructure in the US is just inherently more expensive than in other countries. It is a political problem, and unfortunately, only has political solutions.
Amtrak receives well more than $1 billion a year in federal subsidies and still loses millions of dollars per year. It is private only in the broadest sense of the word.
Amtrak doesn't own most of its rails. They have to negotiate with, e. g. BNSF and Union Pacific to use their tracks in most of the country. This often has led to limits on services and schedules, because they don't want to repackage their profitable freight offerings, or upgrade trackage sufficient for 100kph freight trains but not 200kph+ modern passenger ones.
The new TGV are all new right of ways for which they had to buy the lands, except in the suburbs where they go through upgraded original tracks that are shared with suburban trains.
And most of the cost of tunnels is the requirement for emergency access and ventilation; the small demonstration tunnel in Vegas lacks these features, and so was cheaper.
To compare, the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland requires emergency cross connections every 325m and access shafts to the surface. The cross connections are perpendicular to the main tunnel and short in length so they have to be dug out more or less with workers anyways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel#/media/Fi...
From sf to la wouldn’t need stops in between. At most you’d need 1-2 stops in between. I could totally see this as cheaper than dealing with every land owner in between the train’s path
Emergency access isn't necessary for Boring Company tunnels. They're so narrow that no one is getting out of a vehicle in an emergency in the first place.
The cost would actually make sense if it were all tunnels. Japan's newest Shinkansen route will be 90% tunnels, and it's estimated at $90bn for 180 miles. Tunneling is expensive as hell.
I wonder if you could lower cost by switching to narrower tunnel gauge. Also, if it's all tunnel you could evacuate some of the air to lower resistance...
narrower tunnel gauge either means less capacity or comfort, or sometimes both. part of why Concorde was retired was because the seats themselves were not actually comfortable, and it could not compete with more spacious business class on traditional airliners with innovations like lie flat beds.
I'm not sure the timeframes quite line up. Lie-flat seating was coming in when the Concorde was retired (after an accident and in the wake of 9/11) but I'm not sure how widespread it was.
But, yes, I've been in a Concorde (not flown in one) and the seating is, at best, modern domestic--non lie-flat--business class.
I actually think this is something that a lot of modern supersonic travel fans miss. If you're willing to spend the money that supersonic travel will cost you can travel very comfortably. And 12-24 hours of time spent relaxing comfortably is not actually a problem for most people.
BA, one of the two Concorde operators, started using lie flat beds in 1999. Six hours vs three in a Concorde for JFK-LHR is totally a worthwhile trade for a cheaper fare if the six hours are mostly during sleeping hours anyways.
There were definitely other problems (the aircraft was a dinosaur, with parts no longer made and a three-person crew; there was no reasonable replacement program on the horizon; the fuel costs of supersonic were hard to justify with the oil prices of the 2000s) but yeah, at some point Concorde's proposition became less and less appealing.
FWIW the biggest supersonic contender these days, Boom, is specifically targeting room and per-mile costs for a modern business-class cabin of 50 people, which is a lot more workable from a business perspective. That being said, the money is not really in transatlantic (where you can sleep for 6-8 hours anyways) but in transpacific, because 12+ hours in a plane is a slog no matter how comfy the seat is.
The narrow tunnel-gage of Boring Company is designed for cars... presumably it'd be possible to have a train vehicle with a form-factor more like stretch minivan than a bus. Lots of moving parts because many many more doors to open-close than a traditional bus or subway. But still, if stop-to-stop times are under half an hour, is it okay to seal someone in stretch-minivan-like train car without a bathroom for half an hour? I dunno.
It does mean that non-stop from LA to San Jose would be right out though. Being conservative and assuming a 300km/h vehicle, you'd want at least 3 stops along the way if people are completely trapped in the vehicle without even being able to stand up, much less relieve themselves.
Cars, being a mostly private affair, are not subject to the public access regulations of public infrastructure.
The bathroom is an obvious problem, and it also ties into problem # 2; the Americans with Disabilities Act. Cars and even minivans are not compliant with ADA without very expensive modification. Airplanes can afford long dwell times and dedicated personnel for people with disabilities, but as designed Boring Company/Hyperloop stuff can't accommodate this in a reasonable way.
CA fucking up HSR has more to do with CA than HSR. The entire thing is basically a mismanaged contractor/consultant gravy train.
Interestingly enough, rail is competitive in the opposite direction from Portland, namely to Seattle, and Seattle to Vancouver. SeaTac is far enough away from both Tacoma and Seattle to be a slog from many parts of the metro area, and the sole highway corridor gets very congested. And it mostly consists of lots of small investments to the existing route, like a $181M bypass that shaved ten whole minutes off of a 3h30 trip, a 6.7% improvement in travel times.
It's most likely these types of smaller improvements that Amtrak will be seeking, and other bang-for-the-buck improvements like electrification. (Even on the same track and same speed limits, electric trains offer better acceleration than their diesel counterparts, which is similar to what we're now seeing from the electrification of cars.)
Most of the delays and lack of consistency come from the rail lines being controlled by other interests. Amtrak is always lowest on the priority totem pole, and is routinely forced to yield to freight lines for hours at a time arbitrarily and without notice.
Lack of high speed rail is an orthogonal issue, and is constantly conflated with fixing the current state of affairs. we don't even have standard passenger rail yet! We need to build more cheap track to connect areas first.
Rail travel is far more efficient than flying, both environmentally and economically. Flying is heavily subsidized in ways that rail is not, and that tends to hide the externalities.
Rail has also been set up to fail with metrics like direct profitability, which is entirely not the point of public transportation. It's like claiming the entire value of a road is the toll money it generates.
> Amtrak is always lowest on the priority totem pole
It's unfortunate, but this is probably the way it should be.
Economically the repeat customer should probably get the benefits of predictability / stability.
Also, passenger commuter lines do stick closer to schedule than long-distance trains.
When I've traveled amtrak, the first time I was surprised to have such unpredictable times, but after that I just factored it in. Most long-distance amtrak travel is for the scenery and the pace, not for private-jet-efficiency.
I don’t think the “economically” part of this statement is at all obvious. Train sets are cheaper than passenger planes but they have to be tied up a lot longer to provide the same passenger-miles. Acquiring land and laying track costs what it actually costs in the US and not what it would it would theoretically cost under foreign labor, regulatory, and property-rights conditions.
Taxpayer money goes to fund the Airline industry in a wide number of ways, just a few would be that fact that most airports are government run, many operating at net loss when proper accounting is used. We also subsidize security (tsa), traffic control (faa), and do not get me started on the billions and billions in bailouts the airlines get with every economic down turn.
So to say the economic part is not obvious one has to be willfully ignorant of government spending, just listing the obvious source of government subsidy there are many other less obvious one including special tax exemptions, and many other programs that have indirect benefits to the industry
This report [0] suggests significantly higher passenger-mile costs in both fares and subsidies for Amtrak vs. air travel. It looks pretty off the cuff, I’m sure you could dispute the methodology, but... let’s see yours.
I find it amusing that in this thread if I make a statement opposing government funding of trains people point out that Airplanes get government funding, and if make a comment opposing government funding of airplanes people point out that trains get government funding
It seems that the 2 groups are completely unable to fathom that a person could simply oppose government funding of both Planes and Trains....
Neither Amtrak nor Air Travel should get ANY tax payer money, for any purpose or reason..
Do you have this confused with a different subthread perhaps? The argument you made above is that rail is obviously more economically efficient than aviation, and that to doubt this is willfully ignorant.
And rail would literally not exist without way more government intervention (eminent domain), subsidies, and bailouts. On the eve of self driving it is actually obvious that rail is economically inferior by several orders of magnitude.
> Rail has also been set up to fail with metrics like direct profitability, which is entirely not the point of public transportation. It's like claiming the entire value of a road is the toll money it generates.
It's this mentality that is exactly the problem. If a public transportation system can pull a profit that means it's actually creating value for people in excess of the resources that it took to create.
If you look at the best public transit systems in the world most of them are either for profit corporations or explicitly chartered to generate revenue (MTR/Comfort Delgro in sg, MRT in hong kong, tokyo subway). I'm aware that MTR recently got nationalized, so we shall see if the quality remains.
Do you have a study as a source that backs that up? I'm personally skeptical, as public transportation is weighted significantly towards ineffective demand.
This also neglects the question of positive externalities attached to public transportation systems that aren't accounted for in a profit / revenue metric, such as lower property prices, more flexible labor markets, and the quality of life improvements of mixed use zoning that high use public transportation facilitate.
Buses make more sense than passenger rail. More flexible routing. More flexible time tables. Utilize existing infrastructure. Dedicated right of way easier to create by reconfiguration of existing roads.
When the Colorado Plateau snows in - as it does about every winter - a bus to LA can simply detour south toward Phoenix.
Also level crossings and equipment breakdowns. Collisions between cars and trains are not uncommon. In my first and last Amtrak trip, I rode from Chicago to Las Vegas and was nearly 24 hours late on arrival, due to delays from freight traffic, hitting a car at a crossing, and having a locomotive break down. And my luggage was delayed for another day after that.
At the scale of the US, passenger rail is disconnected from geography. Look at the map and locate Salt Lake City. It sits in the endorheic watershed known as the Great Basin. It is the only metro area of more than a million people in the Basin. The Great Basin is about the size of France.
From Salt Lake City heading west the first metro of more than one million is Sacramento a thousand kilometers away. In between is nothing but mountain ranges running north south. The little ones only nerds and locals can name. The big one, the Sierra Nevada, which most Americans will vaguely allude to as “the Rockies.” Despite the Rockies being five hundred kilometers to the east of Salt Lake City.
Even further on the other side of the Rockies sits Denver 800 km away. It's the closest million plus metro to the east of Salt Lake. Again across north south mountain ranges.
That’s 1800 km of mountain traversing rail line that only serves Salt Lake City. And it’s still almost that far - 1600 km - to Chicago...and a mere 1200 km to New York City.
The US is vast. Europeans don’t have practical rail from Helsinki to Athens. Or Berlin to Baku. Both significantly shorter than NYC to San Francisco.
This only applies from the Midwest to the West Coast. There's no geographical reason the Northeast (and parts of the South) should not be densely connected with intercity rail.
I agree in theory. In practice, national rail has to pass the Senate where Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Hawaii, and the Dakotas are twelve percent of the votes. Throw in all the places you are leaving out and you're close to half the of it.
National passenger rail isn't politically viable in the US because passenger rail is an absurd approach in most of the US.
Not in terms of population density, which is what matters when it comes to intercity rail. I know this isn't convincing to senators from big western states — but we've gotta draw a line in the sand in allocating decision making power to big empty spaces in this country, it's becoming an existential concern at this point.
Existential for whom? You talk about "this country" so clearly it's not everyone in the world. And you talk about the big western states, so it's not me as I live in California.
So really, it's just your concern that is important to you. There's no "we" in it. Only what benefits you.
If you think intercity rail is a great idea, you don't need the US Senate. Just your own local and state officials to boldly pay for it with your own local and state taxes.
The federal government is the issuer of our currency and is well-positioned to fund intercity rail in a way that states and cities just aren't. It's bad that, as you suggested, the senators from large and sparsely populated western states could shoot the idea down because it doesn't happen to work for their states, even though it could be a great solution for 200+ million people on the coasts (California included) in the South, and in the Great Lakes region. If the United States can't mobilize to build infrastructure because a minority of the country doesn't want to, that's an existential threat to the country.
The existential threat to the US is that war upon the locals is establishing methodology. Your championing it here is symptomatic of its continual underlying appeal as the alternative to self control.
The problem isn’t that some states won’t go along. It’s that you think of Hawaii as owing you fealty. New Mexico as obliged to pay tribute.
The problem is that geography and history make the US unsustainable over the long term. There’s no “Plymouth Rock therefore California.” No “Jamestown therefore Santa Fe.” No “Mount Vernon therefore Maui.”
I dunno if this is really some high modernist plot to assimilate all of these quirky little polities into a single transportation regime. If New Mexico or Montana don't want trains I really couldn't care less. But the actual power dynamic is the inverse of what you're positing: the western states elect senators with frontier mindsets who value austerity and self-reliance (nevermind who is paying for the interstates that crisscross their states) and they exert an outsize influence on policy for the rest of the country. "Santa Fe therefore Jamestown" is actually a fantastic summary of how federal transportation policy has been standardized over the last seventy years, using the sparsest and least geometrically constrained places as a yardstick for what should be built (freeways) and for whom (people making 20+ mile city-suburb or suburb-suburb commutes).
> The problem is that geography and history make the US unsustainable over the long term.
Here we agree, which is why the US should build several dense intercity rail networks within its borders which will eventually serve as skeletons for its balkanized successor states :)
I suppose you consider federalism itself to be "war upon the locals". That ship sailed (or perhaps burned and sank) when the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the Constitution.
continual underlying appeal as the alternative to self control
If I could only just control my compulsive, pathological desire for decent-quality intercity rail travel in densely populated regions...
The problem isn’t that some states won’t go along. It’s that you think of Hawaii as owing you fealty. New Mexico as obliged to pay tribute.
By that logic, taxpayers in New York have been paying fealty to Texans in the Fort Worth area (via the Lockheed F-35 construction facility) for years.
The two southern routes don't cross the Rockies. The route through Flagstaff crosses the Colorado Plateau. It skirts south of the Rockies through La Junta following the Santa Fe trail...La Junta is named for the point on the old Spanish maps where the alternative routes of Santa Fe trail came to a junction. La Junta (literally "the junction") is east of Salida Colorado where the Arkansas River provides an exit ("salida" in Spanish) from the Rocky Mountains. It's the route Francis Parkman used and describes in his book The Oregon Trail...he never got very close to Oregon. The opium might have had something to do with that.
The southernmost route traverses the mountains of the Basin and Range physiographic region.
You're right that the proposal is disconnected from reality -- but it's not because Amtrak can't be a competitive option for a significant portion of the population. It's because of how Amtrak is funded.
There are a handful of routes in the US where Amtrak is currently competitive. As others have mentioned, these are mostly in the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak should be investing in improving these, but instead treats them like a cash cow to fund unprofitable routes elsewhere.
There are also a few routes that, with a little bit of investment, could be competitive. LA to San Diego is one example -- they're the #2 and #8 largest cities in the US, only 120 miles apart, and one has notoriously bad traffic. The biggest problem with current service is that some sections of the route share a single track for both directions of travel, which can lead to cascading delays. They're fixing this, but because there's so little funding, it's going to take 30 years just to lay a few dozen miles of track alongside the existing track. It would seem like a no-brainer to prioritize this.
But because Amtrak requires congressional funding, and no member of congress wants to be left out, you end up getting grand plans that touch every state in the country, and you have to add routes that have no chance of being successful just to get enough votes. Eyeballing the map, it looks like the only state in the continental US without a stop is South Dakota.
I wish rail in the US were run more like those in Japan - private companies who derive their profits from real estate in and around stations, not solely from fares. It always astounds me how unproductive the land around Amtrak and other public transit stations are - if you’re building a tube that sends people into land you own, there’s immense opportunity for you, and in a way that’s the whole point - the reason people ride trains is usually not to ride the train, but to go somewhere, so why not operate that “somewhere”?
I wonder if Amtrak is the antipattern here for just that reason. Or even the state. How about county to county? Rail just can't cost this much in actuality. It's gotta be the systematics
> There is simply no future in which passenger rail competes with air travel in the US. Even in circumstances where the distances are not too great, and the political and bureaucratic hurdles are.
This ignores the existence of climate change. Air travel is not sustainable and air travel is least amenable to conversion to hydrogen or electric.
As you mention, the chief barriers to HSR in North America are political and bureaucratic, not practical. What's missing, then, is the political will to do hard things.
Governments used to be able to do things, when the situation demanded it.
But passenger road traffic is only 7%. The rest is freight which requires a completely different solution.
There is no low hanging fruit. We need to address every sector. No individual solution is going to cut more than a few percent of total carbon emissions.
A buddy of mine worked for a startup a few years ago that promised to go into large plants and do some trickery with the harmonic losses with the very large AC motors in a lot of the big equipment. Apparently there is a lot of losses in such things. They would install equipment to improve the situation in exchange for a portion of the energy savings over time, which was considerable.
Yes, because all those plants have big AC motors driving the machinery. Any place where there is a big AC motor can benefit from this. That means most of the applications you can think of.
A society that takes climate change seriously will replace international air travel with passenger ships featuring high-speed satellite internet and spacious work areas. Little-known fact, ocean travel is 3x more energy-efficient than even rail.
People value their time. There is a reason we replaced modes of travel that require days or weeks of travel time with modes of travel that only require hours. Society and culture has been heavily optimized around the fact that it doesn't take weeks to get to where you are trying to go. The world is global and distances are long.
Few people want to be stuck on a passenger ship for weeks at a time, their objective is not to be sitting on a ship. It would make international travel completely infeasible for all but a minority. No one would be able to do simple things like visit family if it required a month or more of round-trip transit time.
Society is organized around individuals and groups working in mutual self interest. If you go against this principle to find your solution you risk backlash to your (perceived or real) tyranny.
Society is not organized around individuals and groups working in mutual self-interest. Society is organized around the interests of the wealthy. Indeed, only people who are quite well-off manage to take international flights. Immigrants I know are happy if they manage to travel back and meet their families once every 3-5 years.
These aren't luxuries, business and society is global now. Unwinding a century of globalization would impoverish many regions of the world. It isn't a mere inconvenience, it would be undoing a vast amount of economic development and progress. People aren't going to be receptive to sacrificing any hope of prosperity for them and theirs.
An argument of "but climate change" is tone deaf and not very compelling when it is you getting thrown under the bus for the Greater Good. Economic realities can't be ignored when they are inconvenient.
Unsurprising that someone who, from their bio, "splits their time between Seattle and London" is against this idea.
The economic effects of climate change will be more catastrophic than making it take longer to move internationally, something that very very few people actually have a need to do.
Nice non sequitur and evasion of an inconvenient point. I travel internationally because it is necessary, not because I particularly want to. Rather more business than you may imagine cannot be done remotely. Nonetheless, my carbon footprint is significantly lower than the average American.
Addressing climate change in anything more than a performative way will require massive increases in global industrialization, not less. Impactful eco-friendly infrastructure isn't going to build itself. Needlessly making this slower and more difficult than necessary just lends credence to the idea that climate change activists aren't serious about addressing the problem.
The promotion of non-serious solutions to climate change make it much more difficult to get by in from average people for supporting credible and substantive solutions. Which isn't helpful if the objective is to constructively address climate change.
It isn't a "non sequitur" to point out you're part of a very small class of people taking multiple international flights a year. That isn't what that term means! Anything you view as "necessary" is very unlikely to be so in the face of existential concerns. But of course, anything that derails your lifestyle just isn't serious.
There's no society on earth taking climate change as seriously as warranted if the worst projections are to be believed.
And there's no precedent for the level of global cooperation -- which would have to transcend nation-level political realities -- required for meaningful change.
I'm long on humanity. But not because I think we're all going to wake up and fix the climate in a coordinated manner.
The trouble with zeppelins is that unloading is difficult. Every lb of weight removed from the Zeppelin is another lb of lift that has to be offset. So you have to do things like pump water into the zeppelin as people or cargo disembark. Ships also face this problem to an extent (unloaded ships are unstable) but they are sitting inside a functionally infinite pool of water they can pump in & out.
Hmmm, running some rough calculations the passenger load probably wouldn't exceed about 50 tons for 500 people. Which is very doable to do with a tether. So maybe you're right! Solar-powered passenger airships could be the future. It's cargo airships I'm thinking of that really have these drawbacks.
And for a cargo zeppelin, swapping out full shipping containers for weighted ballast shipping containers seems pretty easy. Though I seriously doubt cargo zeppelins make any sense at all.
There are also carbon capture and sequestration and closed-loop hydrocarbon fuel production using carbon-neutral energy sources.
It’s completely false, unnecessary, and counterproductive to spread FUD about climate change requiring substantial reductions in quality of life. People are smart and resourceful enough to solve these problems.
> This ignores the existence of climate change. Air travel is not sustainable and air travel is least amenable to conversion to hydrogen or electric.
Which means you’d have to use hydrocarbon fuel. Which can be chemically produced from atmospheric CO2 and water if you have enough carbon-neutral energy. Or you could sequester an offsetting amount of CO2 if that would be more efficient.
In North America geography is the primary impediment to passenger rail of all stripes. High speed rail is even more at the mercy of physical reality.
Look at the article’s map. That empty distance between San Antonio and El Paso is nearly 900km of West Texas emptiness. There’s Del Rio and Van Horne as the biggest towns and Marfa as perhaps the most famous.
When last was San Antonio to El Paso an important trip for someone you know?
Peak oil is “a largely forgotten issue” because it was a largely overblown issue to begin with. Fracking relieved the immediate supply pressure while reductions in demand will help matters even more.
Fuel shortages are unlikely to be a serious risk for centuries. Hydrocarbon reserves are measured in the trillions of barrels (in the US alone) and the different types are largely fungible at <$100 barrel inasmuch as you can convert them all into fuel.
We may greatly reduce hydrocarbon fuel usage but it won't be because we ran out in my lifetime.
PRT is incredibly new technology in an industry that is incredibly slow to innovate. Are you really calling PRT dead after 30 years of ideation and literally 1 medium scale project? Seems pretty premature to call it dead if you ask me.
PRT is short for Personal Rapid Transit, and it's a form of transit that basically combines some sort of fixed-guideway-like system with small-capacity individually-routable pods instead of trains. As a result, it kind of ends up with the worst of both worlds: you have the infrastructure complexity (and cost) of a train with the throughput (or lack thereof) of single-occupant cars.
(Musk's Loop idea is basically another iteration of the PRT concept.)
You do not have the infrastructure complexity and cost of trains. Because vehicles are small (pounds instead of tons), guideways are literally an order of magnitude cheaper. You can build track for $5 million per mile instead of $50 or $100 million per mile. You can build a grid system instead of arterial lines. Guideway is light so can be off the grid and easily avoid dangerous intersections with roads and other ground pathways. A single skytran guideway has capacity of 14,400 per hour - more capacity than 7 lanes of freeway or [3 tracks of at-grade light rail](https://www.liveabout.com/passenger-capacity-of-transit-2798...) and 50% more than grade-separated light rail (which is rare).
Morgantown PRT has 20-person capacity cars. That doesn't seem so inefficient. On the other hand, it only operates as a PRT during off-peak according to the wiki page - during peak hours, it's just a standard scheduled service like a train or bus.
That said, the Musk Loop type plans where the cabs/cars only carry 1-4 people - which seems similar to this SkyTran - is obviously inefficient and not really a realistic alternative to cars or mass transit systems.
You only think that because you haven't done the math. Its frustrating to hear people talk about how something is "obvious" when by "obvious" they just mean "I haven't actually put any thought into it.
A single Skytran track has more capacity than 7 lanes of freeway or 3 tracks of light rail. Does that sound "obviously" inefficient to you?
A lane of freeway can move about 1500-2000 people per hour in single-occupant vehicles. If you're moving 2k people/hour in 4-person cars on a fixed guideway, you need to have about 10 seconds between vehicles. That's about 8 seconds for a car to physically clear the switch, the switch to physically move to an alternative position, and then the trailing car to cross the space needed to come to a complete stop should the switch fail to actually work. If you claim 7× the capacity, you need to do all of that in a little more than a second.
So, yes I have "actually put any thought into it." I've put sufficient thought to recognize standard gadgetbahn claims with standard gadgetbahn levels of evidence backing them up, and thus I can respond with standard gadgetbahn criticisms.
People seem to want inter-regional passenger rail for it’s own sake and search around for a justification to stick on that preference.
From an environmental perspective low speed inter-regional fright rail makes a lot more sense.
Where high(er) speed passenger rail could really shine is intra-regional lines. Granted stops slow things down, but the NYC region commuter lines (LIRR, MMR, NJT) have horrible average speeds.
I understand from friends in greater DC and the Bay Area that the situations there are similar.
The irony is that some parts of the United States had great rail connections in the past, and they were torn up to make way for roads.
The front range of Colorado, for example, had trains everywhere in the late 1800s. It was the way to get between Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Boulder, Golden, and other cities on the front range.
Now they're trying to build a rail link between Denver and Boulder, and it's costing a fortune and running into all kinds of NIMBYism and bureaucracy.
I'd love to see it, but the way it's going I'm skeptical it will ever beat out the RTD buses.
Just to add: Portland to Oakland is only 628mi.. most people have cars, and it's only $60-80 in gas. Even if they gave me a free ticket, I wouldn't trade 10 hours for that.
10 hours of active driving is something completely different than 20 hours being a passenger/sightseer (of which I would spend significant part asleep or reading) In fact I don't think it's safe to drive for 10 hours, you probably need to add several hours of rest, and will still be half zombie after that.
At some point the train becomes attractive. It's certainly a much less stressful option.
That said I must agree American trains are in poor shape compared to other places.
Well-marked, well-maintained, well-signed, and gradient/curve controlled interstate highways are among the easiest for self-driving vehicles. It's just about possible today (but expensive and in some ways legally unsolved).
It would be shocking if America didn't have popular, reasonably-priced self-driving highway vehicles in 14 years to do that (14 years used to match the timeline of Amtrak's 2035 map).
And an additional amount of maintenance costs, vehicle depreciation, insurance, etc. Driving might still come out less expensive, but ignoring all the extra costs makes it look cheaper than it really is.
I’ve taken the Acela from NYC to DC and back many times, and it is quite nice. But a big advantage it gets is how much of a pain it is to reach area airports in both cities. If intra-regional mass transit was improved that would paradoxically hurt the competitiveness of inter-regional rail.
Even if getting to the airport is convenient, you still need to arrive 1 hour before your flight, and deal with security, boarding procedures, taxi, air traffic control, etc on both sides.
In Japan, I can literally show up for a Shinkansen five minutes before departure and hop right on.
Airports for short range traffic are fscking awful.
* I can’t just show up for the Acela five minutes before departure. It’s not nearly as bad as flying, but there is ceremony involved.
* Security and boarding are a lot better when you are a frequent business traveler. That’s who is going to make the bulk of the DC-NYC trips regardless of modality. We shouldn’t compare the tourist experience between the two.
The door-to-door times will still be worse on DC<->NYC trips. I grew up in Baltimore-Washington area, and lived in NYC for a time, and used to take Acela every weekend down. I could get door-to-door in about 3.5 hrs. No way I could get in-out of NYC airport or Dulles/National in that time, even if I was a frequent biz traveler.
What about Newark? I went through Newark Penn Station a few times and it seems decent. Is it a PITA to go between Newark Penn Station and the airport, or is the airport itself a bigger hassle than most?
Last time I went through LAX there were no good options for getting from there to downtown LA.
Newark is probably the least bad, but you still have to take a slow second train (AirTrain) after getting to Newark Penn. Also, while the NJ Transit trains are better set up for travelers than the LIRR to JFK they aren’t nearly as nice as the dedicated setup they have in London.
Although Heathrow Express is quite pricey compared to the tube and, depending upon where you're going, may not even be more convenient. More often than not, I'm near Trafalgar Square so I just take the Piccadilly Line in. But, yes, Heathrow has good transit options in general (although it's an expensive cab ride).
NYC to Montreal (~370mi) takes ~8 hours by bus and 11 hours by train, though granted, times at Customs is more variable for the bus than for the train. I'm often surprised at how much the train shakes side to side on the occasions it's going "fast".
Contrast that to the TGV in France, which zooms around at 200mph and covered one of my trips between Paris and Avignon (~430mi) in ~2.75hrs about a decade ago. US train infrastructure feels extremely behind in comparison. Perhaps it's because of a greater emphasis on highway travel.
NYC to Montreal is not part of the NEC; the NEC is solely the portion from DC to Boston.
That said, the NYC-Montreal and Boston-Toronto lines are lines that absolutely should be dedicated high-speed passenger rail in addition to the NEC, but they are not even dedicated passenger rail lines at the moment let alone proper 220mph HSR lines.
To be fair, that leg of the TGV happens to be some of the best track in the whole system. It's practically a straight, non-stop shot from Paris to Avignon on double decker cars with panoramic windows.
It's strange to see the contrast between how relatively large a share of transportation Amtrak has in the Northeast Corridor compared to elsewhere in the country. I've heard this ascribed to population density, but it doesn't seem like trains are as popular in places like Texas or Southern California.
Huge advantage of amtrak is that the stations are in prime locations. In the northeast that's a huge advantage as going from train to destination might be a 15 minute walk. Meanwhile airport to destination could be an hour drive. Sunbelt cities have no density, so the trains location isn't as valuable.
Development and land use patterns are way different in the Sunbelt. There are lines that go through most downtowns but most of the people live far from the stations. The passenger trains also share lines with freight and freight is prioritized, a trip from Austin to Dallas by Amtrak takes 6 hours but can be driven in 3 or so.
Lots of people in the Northeast don't live in downtowns either. One big difference if that, if you're taking a trip to one of the big cities, you often don't need or even want a car when you get there. On the other hand, if you can drive somewhere in 4-5 hours, taking a train and then having to rent a car when you arrive seems a lot less attractive.
Much of the Northeast Regionals route is effectively a functioning megapolis. You are not going to find anywhere close to similar conditions anywhere else in the United States.
It functions that way because it has a functioning rail line? Or at least semi-functional. YOu are right you won't find those conditions anywhere else in the US but that is our own fault
I'm not sure how true that is even though Amtrak is one mover of people. One of the reasons I for one tend to take Amtrak is that Boston area into Manhattan is mostly a pretty awful drive and it isn't because there are so few vehicles on the road. Also, pre-Acela business travelers mostly flew (and many still do) on the northern section of the corridor. And, even today, most business travelers aren't going to take the train from Boston to DC.
So it seems pretty probable to me that Acela came about because there was already a huge and increasing demand for such a service.
It could exist without the rest of the network, and probably be cheaper. Why is NJ Transit so much cheaper to go from Philly (via Trenton) to NYC? I think the Northeast Corridor might be subsidizing other parts of Amtrak.
Yes, the Northeast Corridor is the only profitable part of Amtrak, that is why Amtrak tried to cut as much service as possible outside the Northeast Corridor prior to Joe Biden taking office.
Yep. Basically the Northeast Corridor is a pretty profitable route. In part, this is because the Acela is basically priced as high as it can be while remaining competitive with air. Business travelers generally pay it because it's a bit more comfortable, a bit faster, and there are fewer plebes than the non-Acela option. Oh, and it's not their money. (And it is competitive with air depending upon your preferences.)
To be honest, when it's my own money I usually just take the regular regional train. It's about half the price and because it can piggyback off the electrification done for Acela, it takes less than an hour more.
Agree. It's 30 more minutes to read or something and 30 less minutes at my destination.
On other routes being slow is a massive liability though. If people could get from San Francisco to Portland in 10 hours, or even 12 hours, instead of 18 hours, it would be much more practical. At 18 hours it messes up your sleep schedule rather than just giving you more time to read.
It might just not be worth it to spend more on rail travel from Portland to SF though. It's just a reality of geography rather than somebody's mistake that travel from SF to Portland is harder than travel from DC to NYC.
I don't understand why self-driving cars aren't being discussed here. Trains require massively expensive redundant infrastructure, fail completely at last-mile, and you're at the mercy of a rigid departure schedule. We already have an incredible highway network in America - let's put it to better use.
It's so easy to imagine taking a self-driving sleeper taxi overnight between Portland and Oakland in 10 hours - just throw a bed in the damn thing, go to sleep, and wake up at your destination. Give self-driving cars a dedicated lane with a different speed limit, and you could bomb the trip in 7 hours, easy. It'd all utilize existing infrastructure, we'd just be increasing the throughput.
If the car is electric, it'll be multiples cheaper than the fuel costs of driving yourself, a spiffy van with nice spread out reclining seats could have multiple passengers so the cost could be split further, and it'd probably be 1-2 orders of magnitude better for the environment than taking a flight.
Everything you've said there applies to a current mode of transportation called "the bus". Unlike self-driving cars, we already have them.
Ten hours by road. Large enough to have sleeper compartments or reclining seats. (Large enough to have restrooms.) Driven by an NI -- natural intelligence -- whose competence is accredited by the state government in a reasonably fair examination of skills. Give a dedicated lane to the bus, and seven hours might be within reach.
Really, the problem is that I see flights between the two cities at $70 per person and 2.5 hours in the air. Even if it takes an hour on each extra, that's 5.5 hours versus 7 for a fairly reasonable price.
The bus still fails the last mile, it's subject to rigid departure schedules, and doesn't offer the comfort of being in an individual compartment.
All these modes of transportation have pros and cons. How do we get people to take less flights? Busses already exist. Decent fast and cheap trains don't, nor do self-driving cars. Both will help poach people away from shorter flights, but one is (potentially) much cheaper and easier to implement.
Yes! The technology for rail exists today (and is well proven in Europe and Asia). Self driving cars are largely new and unproven with no clear path to widespread use, with both regulatory and sociatal challenges, in addition to the technical shortcomings that remain.
I would hope that Amtrak in the long term also electrifies the rail network so that the dependency on diesel engines can be reduced - for some routes this may not make sense, but where you have frequent services it seems that it would be a worthwhile impovement too.
That whole western north-south corridor is heavily populated by freight trains, and Amtrak trains have to sit on sidings to let the freighters go by. As a result, the train spends a lot of time not moving. It's one of Amtrak's worst lines, IMO. I did Seattle-to-LA once on Amtrak. Never again.
It's unfortunate - the western north-south corridor has the potential to be a very useful transit link. I (pre-covid) took the train from Vancouver, BC to Seattle, WA semi-regularly as my preferred mode of travel, but there was at least one instance I can recall of a multi-hour delay due to freight traffic...
Part of why it ballooned was that Palmdale wanted to be in on the route. So that connection would add more time and money to the project. There were a lot of cities that wanted to be in on this.
From personal experience (family that lives in Fresno), Fresno revamped downtown to get ready for all this. They cleaned up the Fulton Mall route, pumped a ton of money into the area, realtors were banking on Airbnb housing for all the construction jobs coming in from out of town. Fresno even made a concession to allow tiny trailers to be parked and connected on properties with homes on them already. Then the state shut it down.
Another reason from what I’ve pieced together is that California had so many hurdles to jump through. Namely the environmental reports that had to be made.
The the only way to make something "attractive" to the population is to place up on its competition prohibitive taxation then you have already lost.
Further if that is your "dream" to impose prohibitive taxation on the population I would question your ethical foundation as well
Edit: for the record since someone below is using a straw-man to claim I support subsidies, I dont. I prefer the government stay out it completely, neither taxing nor subsidizing (nor bailing out) anything, or any industry. I am not Pro or Anti Rail, nor I am Pro or Anti Air Travel. I am Anti-Government intervention...
There are far better ways to handle Externalities than a carbon tax.
Which BTW under most proposed versions of the Carbon tax is nothing more than a political tool, not a tool to properly account for externalities
Governments do not have a track record for being trust worthily enough to be placed in charge of controlling Externalities, it would inevitably be used to usurp power, and liberty from the people, while unjustly enriching their political allies.
This happens every day, in every government. As the saying goes "Government: if you think you have problems wait until you see our solutions."
In bankruptcy, assets would be sold off (the planes wouldn't be crushed). Businesses restructured and life would go on. It's extremely unlikely no one would be willing to take air travel, even at higher prices than current (I like flying NYC/SF at $150/flight, but I would do it at $600/flight too).
> Going from Portland to Oakland is supposed to take 18 hours but actually took 20 when I rode it.
Seriously? That's the speed of our slowest local regional trains here in Europe. Long distance trains are about twice as fast per km even on a trip one fourth the length and with several stops. If this is a regular state of affairs then it's no wonder that the state of train travel in the US is what it is.
It is about 1000 mountainous kilometers from Portland to Oakland. There are no major metropolitan areas in between. Just places most people have only vaguely heard of surrounded by places only the locals ever go.
And there are very few reasons to travel from Portland to Oakland on a dedicated itinerary. No critical business relationships. No historic ties. No cultural affiliation.
Comparisons of US rail to Europe usually ignore most of Europe. 18 hours reflects a rail speed comparable to what Google returns for a train trip from Zagreb to Tirana. I'm not sure you can even take a train from Berlin to Baku.
> It is about 1000 mountainous kilometers from Portland to Oakland.
If you drive along I-5 from Portland to Oakland, there is one mountain pass (Siskiyou summit[1]). Most of the trip is very flat, as you're traveling through Oregon's Willamette valley and California's central valley.
The question is...why does a major inter-city railroad lead through such a strange route?
> 18 hours reflects a rail speed comparable to what Google returns for a train trip from Zagreb to Tirana
Ehm...I don't believe there's been railway connection from anywhere to Tirana since 2013. Albanian railway infrastructure is largely non-existent at this point. And the only international railway connection to Albania is freight-only. Not quite sure what Google told you there.
The route is determined by plate tectonics. Subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the North American Plate generates substantial orogenic forces. The rail route runs between the coastal ranges to the west and the spine of the Americas that extends from the Arctic to the Patagonia...aka, "the American Cordillera."
Quite simply it runs along the best available route. Down the Willamette Valley to Eugene and then...well it has to make do past Mount Shasta until near Sacramento.
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I'm not going to express faux outrage at the shortcomings of European rail based on the lack of service to Triana. Rather it is to point out that in this sort of discussion of US passenger rail, Europeans tend to ignore a great deal of Europe. More understandable is the misunderstanding of US geography, even in the US people presume similar political geography implies similar physical geography.
Finally, Oakland to Portland is not a major passenger route. Not really even a major rail route since the sea is a viable alternative for freight along the coast and most freight in the US travels east-west.
In that case I don't understand what are those plans for that major high-speed rail on the west coast about. If this is "the best available route" for a major north-south railway along the US west coast, then those high-speed rail plans are a pipe dream, surely?
As for Albania, you know how to pick the one part of Europe where train service is crap - anything from Bosnia southeastwards in http://emptypipes.org/supp/isochrone_zagreb/. Pretty much any other direction is perfectly serviceable and vastly better connected. Apparently you can get sooner to Paris from Zagreb by train that to any of Albania. Is the US west coast due to its geography a similar uniquely bad place?
The sane passenger rail plans in the US West are regional. Connecting Portland, the Puget Sound and Vancouver on the one hand. Serving the cities of California’s Central Valley on the other. The California route makes some sense as a high speed route. Less so as a connection of LA and San Francisco because it is roundabout. The more direct route follows the old Camino Real up the Salinas River Valley and then the San Andreas Rift toward San Jose where the 101 runs today.
The US west is mostly empty. When you look at the article’s map even the named places are tiny. La Junta is tiny. Flagstaff is less than 100,000 as a metro. Reno is about half a million. Cheyenne is in Wyoming. The entire state has fewer than a million people.
In terms of European rail travel, I avoided the low hanging fruit like Dublin to Lisbon, Reykjavík to London, or Oslo to Paris.
I know it sounds absurd, but you can check Google Maps for the possible routes and times.[1] It looks like a Greyhound bus is actually 2 hours faster (16 hours). Also it looks like some parts of the track along the west coast are undergoing maintenance. If you want to take the train down to San Diego you have to get off your train, take a bus, then get on another train.[2]
Its a little short of 1200km and goes through some very rugged terrain (cascade mountains). Yes, it would be nice if it was faster, but comparing it to say Paris - Berlin (about the same distance) isnt quite right for several reasons.
Yep, that should be slightly under 10 hours on my country's terrible railway network (if my country were that long). We have to operate those ETR 470-derived trains ("ČD Class 680") at like 65-70% of their design speed since we don't have any proper rails for them either.
Amtrak is already competitive in certain regions. The northeast is the most obvious, but the train is my preferred mode of travel between Vancouver, BC and Seattle, WA. Whilst a flight is quicker, in the air, door to door is no faster. Driving generally would be quicker but I do try to be concious of the carbon impact of my travel choices.
The primary issue I have is that the hours the service runs, the first departure is a little too late to arrive for a morning meeting, and the latest is a little too early to leave the office after 5 - an earlier and later option would make it very viable for one day business travel.
Whilst the US population is generally much less dense than much of Europe, there are large areas (PNW, the northeast, much of California) that definitely have high enough population density to support an extensive rail network. Yes there must be political will to make these improvements, but surely that is true of all infrastructure spending?
Even on the Northeast Corridor the morning meeting thing is real from Boston to NY. You really need to go down the night before. Which I'm generally fine with. Have a nice meal, etc. But when I can't I'll end up flying (or driving) in the morning.
I agree that east to west and north to south cross-country rail is a novelty. The short haul trains are often useful though. I think the novelty is worth keeping but they should focus on that novelty. I'd like to see them have just one east to west route, say, from SF to NYC, and one route on each coast, and besides that coordinate the short haul trains with the cities/states that are using them, perhaps even letting the cities/states run some of them fully. The short haul trains should be run separately from the novelty trains. The proposal is the opposite, and that's why I think it's not a good one.
For example, I'd like for the train to Miami to skip Orlando and Tampa, and for Brightline to be left to bring service back if it makes economic sense (they're already working on Orlando). If not, there are buses like Megabus and Flixbus. That would shorten the Boston to Miami route quite a bit.
It's been pointed out numerous times elsewhere in the threads, but long-haul routes are short-haul routes, for people in the middle. Very few people drive I-80 from end to end. Lots of people drive it for trips like Iowa City to Omaha.
I'm aware of that. I don't think amtrak is a good alternative to the interstate (I agree with the comnent I'm replying to), so we should stop trying to make it one. A single cross-country route that runs during waking hours and has fewer stops would be cool though.
Hah, I actually lived less than half a mile from the Emeryville station for over a year. I was just thinking in terms of the metro area, but that does tack on some more time!
Rail travel shouldn't compete with air travel. It should be a fast, comfortable alternative to intercity car and bus travel between major destinations.
This model already works well along the Northeast corridor. Even the slow, delay-ridden Empire Service (thank CSX for that) ran full trains between New York and Albany(before Covid). Not to mention the main DC to Boston route.
The failure of intercity rail does not seem all that distinct from the general failure to invest in infrastructure in the US, and the enormous costs when the investment is attempted.
> Rail travel shouldn't compete with air travel ... This model already works well along the Northeast corridor.
Except the NEC is heavily competing against existing air travel between its common destinations. Or are you generally referring to longer distance air travel? (i.e., 2+ hours by plane?)
Tbh, AMTRAK needs to find its target audience. Right now, work transportation has been a huge thorn for everyone involved. It would be such a boon to commute living from LA to sf for work.
Back in 2019 Governor Newsom put most of the CA HSR plan on hold indefinitely.[1] Now the official plan is to build a 171-mile high speed rail link from Bakersfield (population 524,000) through Fresno (population 542,000) to Merced (population 83,000), though that might be cancelled since it'll cost over $20 billion.[2]
> Second, hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't get you much train in the US. California tried to build a high speed rail route between SF and LA.
It does, just not in hyper regressive California.
You could build a full high-speed rail network between Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio for $100-$150 billion.
You just can't build much of anything in California, period, that's the issue. It's a collapsing state in most metrics that matter for quality of life (and has been for a long time), even the venture capitalists can't abandon the state fast enough. As their capital flees, so goes what remains of California (tech). As taxes go far higher this decade, the flight will get worse, Texas and Florida will keep extracting immense value out of California and New York.
You could, but really, what would HSR in Texas get you? None of those has especially good local transit networks to connect to. Houston and Dallas are famously huge sprawls. If you're talking about downtown to downtown, there's already luxury bus service (Vonlane).
First, Amtrak is not a competitive transportation option. It can be a fun novelty, but it's expensive and slow. Going from Portland to Oakland is supposed to take 18 hours but actually took 20 when I rode it. The same trip in a car takes 10 hours. By plane is 90 minutes. It gets worse: Amtrak cost me more than a plane ticket to the same destination.
Second, hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't get you much train in the US. California tried to build a high speed rail route between SF and LA. The estimated completion cost has skyrocketed to $100 billion and the completion date is 25 years after voters approved the project. The state has since given up on connecting LA & SF by high speed rail.
There is simply no future in which passenger rail competes with air travel in the US. Even in circumstances where the distances are not too great, and the political and bureaucratic hurdles are.