I think a lot of the HST skeptics would do well to spend some time in the northeast. In just 10 years, Amtrak has captured 75% of the traffic between NYC and DC, and over 50% of the traffic between NYC and Boston. It's phenomenal. At my office, nobody takes flights between NYC/PHL/DC anymore. Why go out to LaGuardia when you can walk over to Penn Station, enjoy WiFi and a ton of leg room, not to mention a snack car, and get there in about the same amount of time as flying? Oh, and you're dropped off right in downtown DC, instead of Reagan or in the god forsaken suburbs if you're unlucky enough to land in Dulles.
And Amtrak isn't even very good! Years of neglect and bad regulation have left the service with old cars (except Acela), crumbling infrastructure, etc. But it beats the hell out of air travel, and the differential will only get more dramatic as fuel prices continue to increase.
"I think a lot of the HST skeptics would do well to spend some time in the northeast"
Taking "the northeast" to be New England + New York + Pennsylvania + New Jersey, it covers ~135,000 square miles and has a population of ~56 million people.
New Mexico alone has an area of ~121,000 square miles and has only ~2 million people.
Yeah. It makes it a lot easier to build a truly high-speed train.
It's harder for a train to go 200mph through densely populated areas where NIMBYs don't want anything built. Cows, on the other hand, don't care. The train also doesn't have to stop very often -- a train can stop in Albequerque and Santa Fe, and zip north to Colorado Springs and Denver.
The biggest challenge to high-speed trains in the US is not population density or technology; the problem is political.
You're forgetting the immense networks of rural roads. With high speed trains you can't just throw a level crossing up, and wait for a pickup full of chickens to get t-boned at 220mph. And then there is the wildlife - you'd need high fences the entire distance to stop wildlife and stock from wandering onto the tracks, but that also causes other issues with wildlife corridors.
Those rural areas are also largely divided into private property holdings, which have to be resumed meaning compensation for all the property owners.
You're right, the problem is political, in that the politics of the country is set up in such a way that a centralised body cannot just go and throw railways everywhere. But that is a design feature, not a bug. The same governmental processes that stop people ending up with a nuclear waste dump next to their town also apply to railway lines. You can't just plan this stuff from a central office in Washington and make it so.
"You're forgetting the immense networks of rural roads. With high speed trains you can't just throw a level crossing up, and wait for a pickup full of chickens to get t-boned at 220mph. And then there is the wildlife - you'd need high fences the entire distance to stop wildlife and stock from wandering onto the tracks, but that also causes other issues with wildlife corridors."
Right. Because they don't have vehicles, chickens or wildlife in any of the other nations with high-speed rail networks. These are clearly unsolvable problems.
Sometimes it seems like people are just reaching to find any possible excuse to dismiss the idea based on ideology alone, doesn't it?
I really don't think people don't want HSR. It's pretty clear they do. I think it just makes sense to center the HSR around the most valuable areas, not just build it out in rural areas because it's easier to go faster, which is basically equivalent to "because we can" logic. I don't think we should build huge transportation projects just because we can; that's my problem. It has nothing to do with ideology, it's just logic and economics.
As far as the problem with wildlife and trucks and rural roads—you just need a grade-separated track with passages above and below. Expensive but necessary and plausible.
There was talk of a new rail line to the south of Rochester, MN a number of years ago and some landowners were unhappy because the proposed line would split their fields, require new fencing to protect livestock, etc.
Would it be easier to force a half a dozen farmers/landowners to give up part of their property than thousands of house/apartment dwellers? Of course. But its still forcing people and that results in lawsuits which will drag things out.
As a skeptic, I look at the northeast, and say that may be the one place in the country it makes sense to have high speed rail because of the population density, and close proximity of the major cities.
You don't care so much about the density in the abstract, but the size, density, and proximity of the major cities. Several other regions of the U.S. compare favorably to Europe in this regard. E.g. the Great Lakes mega-region has about the same population as France. It's longer (St. Louis to Montreal is about 1,000 miles versus Toulouse to Metz which is about 6,00 miles), but it's also more linear versus France which is squarish. Most importantly, it has 11 metro areas with a population greater than 2 million (leaving out Minneapolis), while France has only 2.
If France can have high speed train from Paris (about the size of Chicago) to Marsaille (about the size of Milwaukee) why can't we have high speed rail between Chicago and Milwaukee (which are much closer together)? Or for that matter Chicago and Detroit, the latter of which is bigger than the 2-4'th largest French metro areas put together?
A more apropos comparison is Paris-Lyon-Marseilles (480 miles, 14 million people) to Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison-Minneapolis (430 miles, 14.9 million people).
A train from Detroit-Chicago-Milwaukee-Minneapolis would in a single 700 mile line cover 1/3 the population of France.
NYC is the largest city in the US and the economic capital. DC is the political capital. Both are huge tourist destinations. There are myriad reasons people travel between them. Minneapolis to Detroit, much less so. The 16 non stop flights (8 each way) between Detroit and Minneapolis probably cover most the needs without an infrastructure project that would cost tens or hundred of billions of dollars.
Since when do we only connect the largest city and the capital? If that's what we did, there would be no trains in France because Paris is basically the only economically important city in the whole country.
Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis and their metro areas together have $900 billion in GDP (about 1/3 the whole GDP of France) and several dozen Fortune 500 companies. There aren't three cities together anywhere in France that have comparable economic importance.[1] Yet, there are trains between a whole bunch of these French cities.
[1] France's second largest city, Lyon, has about the same GDP as Milwaukee or Kansas City.
Because of their unique positions of power, NYC and DC are useful to connect. Minneapolis and Detroit are already connected by rail, train, bus, and car. If you want to spend a hundred billion dollars, the you need to justify it by showing that there some pent up demand for travel along the route, or some gross inefficiency that HSR will correct. GDP isn't a statistic you can substitute for number of daily trips. It is ultimately about how many people ride the train vs how much it costs, right?
One of the major observations about transport is that it's a "build it and they will come" sort of thing. Creating efficient transport links can create demand for travel (just as how if you build more roads, people drive more).
GDP is a better thing to look at then current demand because it gives you an idea of the economic capacity of the region to create demand for travel, on the presumption that demand for travel is intrinsically roughly proportional to economic activity. It's a counter-point to the common refrain that American cities are insufficiently dense and near to support high speed rail. If I can get a high speed train from Frankfurt (GDP: $220 billion) to Paris (GDP: $560 billion), distance 460 miles, why can't I get a high speed train from Detroit (GDP: $250 billion) to Chicago (GDP: $570 billion), distance 280 miles? Why would the demand for travel between the latter pair of cities be intrinsically lower than the demand for travel between the former pair?
The larger point is that while the U.S. may be too big to support HSR criss-crossing from NYC to LA or Atlanta to Seattle, it is divided into several mega-regions, each of which have economic density not that different from that of European countries.
Boston-NYC-PHL-DC, Vancouver-Seattle-Portland, Detroit-Chicago-Minneapolis, Birmingham-Atlanta-Raleigh, even Houston-Dallas-Oklahoma City all link population centers that are roughly the same size and same distance apart as major European cities.
Sure would be nice if the prices were more competitive. You can still get in & out of DC round trip for about half the price of a one-way Acela trip (from Boston). Not worth the premium in most cases... but I want to like it!
So booking a random trip: Wed Mar. 6 to Fri. Mar. 8. For business hours flights (leaving NY at 2 pm, returning at 9AM) I can get UAL for $175 round trip. But that's JFK <-> IAD. But Midtown to JFK is a $50 35 minute cab ride, and Dulles to downtown DC is an $80 40 minute cab ride. Add in an hour at the airport in JFK and half an hour getting out of IAD, you're looking at $305 round trip, and 4 hours for each leg. The Acela Express will get you downtown to downtown for $300 even ($150 each way) in three hours including boarding time/disembark time at each station. The Northeast Regional will get you there for $100 round trip in three and a half hours including boarding/disembark time.
Yep, I was talking about DC, which (from memory) was $279 each way on Acela, but only $140 round trip on Jet Blue into Reagan.
Sounds good to NYC though—I will consider it for sure.
Also, you highlight an interesting deficiency of the Acela: it's only 30 minutes difference in time. On the BOS->DC route it's only a 70 minute advantage on a ~6.5 hour trip. Sort of makes HSR seem unnecessary when compared to "slow" standard regional train service. It's just not that much better.
They need true grade-separated modern HSR on this route. It would be excellent.
I was talking DC to NYC. It can be $250, but there are $150 Acela trains spaced throughout the day. There is a 10 am Acela for $150 that gets you there into DC in time for a late lunch or afternoon meeting. The best part is: you can actually schedule that lunch and count on probably being able to make it.
I can't help but be skeptical when it costs from 3-7 times more than the bus and is only 20-30 minutes shorter of a trip. Of course, it's far more comfortable, but for a 3-5 hr trip, the trade-off is well worth it.
If you book in advance, the Northeast Regional is $50 each way from NYC to DC, versus about $30 for the Washington Deluxe bus. And a far more comfortable trip that's less likely to get stuck in traffic.
Oh, I honestly didn't know the train was that cheap when you book in advance. I've only ever booked the week of.
Still, it's like an hour longer of a trip than the bus. (I guess I haven't had bad experiences with traffic--on my last trip to Boston, we arrived early.)
Another reason to be skeptical is that the longest existing HST line is still only 1/2 as long as the distance from NYC to Los Angeles. If the USA is really interested in country wide coverage like that, it would be unprecedented.
You're right, Amtrak in the Northeast isn't very good. It's the only mode of transportation that completely prohibits carriage of bicycles. And simultaneously one of the few major rail services in the world to do so.
Comments
I think a lot of the HST skeptics would do well to spend some time in the northeast. In just 10 years, Amtrak has captured 75% of the traffic between NYC and DC, and over 50% of the traffic between NYC and Boston. It's phenomenal. At my office, nobody takes flights between NYC/PHL/DC anymore. Why go out to LaGuardia when you can walk over to Penn Station, enjoy WiFi and a ton of leg room, not to mention a snack car, and get there in about the same amount of time as flying? Oh, and you're dropped off right in downtown DC, instead of Reagan or in the god forsaken suburbs if you're unlucky enough to land in Dulles.
And Amtrak isn't even very good! Years of neglect and bad regulation have left the service with old cars (except Acela), crumbling infrastructure, etc. But it beats the hell out of air travel, and the differential will only get more dramatic as fuel prices continue to increase.
"I think a lot of the HST skeptics would do well to spend some time in the northeast"
Taking "the northeast" to be New England + New York + Pennsylvania + New Jersey, it covers ~135,000 square miles and has a population of ~56 million people.
New Mexico alone has an area of ~121,000 square miles and has only ~2 million people.
This matters. A lot.
Yeah. It makes it a lot easier to build a truly high-speed train.
It's harder for a train to go 200mph through densely populated areas where NIMBYs don't want anything built. Cows, on the other hand, don't care. The train also doesn't have to stop very often -- a train can stop in Albequerque and Santa Fe, and zip north to Colorado Springs and Denver.
The biggest challenge to high-speed trains in the US is not population density or technology; the problem is political.
You're forgetting the immense networks of rural roads. With high speed trains you can't just throw a level crossing up, and wait for a pickup full of chickens to get t-boned at 220mph. And then there is the wildlife - you'd need high fences the entire distance to stop wildlife and stock from wandering onto the tracks, but that also causes other issues with wildlife corridors.
Those rural areas are also largely divided into private property holdings, which have to be resumed meaning compensation for all the property owners.
You're right, the problem is political, in that the politics of the country is set up in such a way that a centralised body cannot just go and throw railways everywhere. But that is a design feature, not a bug. The same governmental processes that stop people ending up with a nuclear waste dump next to their town also apply to railway lines. You can't just plan this stuff from a central office in Washington and make it so.
"You're forgetting the immense networks of rural roads. With high speed trains you can't just throw a level crossing up, and wait for a pickup full of chickens to get t-boned at 220mph. And then there is the wildlife - you'd need high fences the entire distance to stop wildlife and stock from wandering onto the tracks, but that also causes other issues with wildlife corridors."
Right. Because they don't have vehicles, chickens or wildlife in any of the other nations with high-speed rail networks. These are clearly unsolvable problems.
Sometimes it seems like people are just reaching to find any possible excuse to dismiss the idea based on ideology alone, doesn't it?
I really don't think people don't want HSR. It's pretty clear they do. I think it just makes sense to center the HSR around the most valuable areas, not just build it out in rural areas because it's easier to go faster, which is basically equivalent to "because we can" logic. I don't think we should build huge transportation projects just because we can; that's my problem. It has nothing to do with ideology, it's just logic and economics.
As far as the problem with wildlife and trucks and rural roads—you just need a grade-separated track with passages above and below. Expensive but necessary and plausible.
There are a lot of old rights-of-way that could be reactivated.
The real problem is economic, not political.
A NY-SF coach-class train ticket cost $65 in 1870. That may not sound like much, but that was 2.8 ounces of gold -- figure $4700 at current prices.
A first-class ticket with sleeping compartment cost $136 -- almost $10,000 in current dollars.
Land owners do care, however.
There was talk of a new rail line to the south of Rochester, MN a number of years ago and some landowners were unhappy because the proposed line would split their fields, require new fencing to protect livestock, etc.
Here in Oregon, other landowners have gotten letters from the railways demanding payment for driveways across their lines just so they can get to their property. See http://www.kval.com/news/local/Neighbors-on-edge-over-new-ra...
Would it be easier to force a half a dozen farmers/landowners to give up part of their property than thousands of house/apartment dwellers? Of course. But its still forcing people and that results in lawsuits which will drag things out.
So you're figuring that the passenger volume between Albuquerque and Santa Fe compares with say, that between New York and Philadelphia?
Topography is also a big challenge.
As a skeptic, I look at the northeast, and say that may be the one place in the country it makes sense to have high speed rail because of the population density, and close proximity of the major cities.
You don't care so much about the density in the abstract, but the size, density, and proximity of the major cities. Several other regions of the U.S. compare favorably to Europe in this regard. E.g. the Great Lakes mega-region has about the same population as France. It's longer (St. Louis to Montreal is about 1,000 miles versus Toulouse to Metz which is about 6,00 miles), but it's also more linear versus France which is squarish. Most importantly, it has 11 metro areas with a population greater than 2 million (leaving out Minneapolis), while France has only 2.
If France can have high speed train from Paris (about the size of Chicago) to Marsaille (about the size of Milwaukee) why can't we have high speed rail between Chicago and Milwaukee (which are much closer together)? Or for that matter Chicago and Detroit, the latter of which is bigger than the 2-4'th largest French metro areas put together?
Between Paris and Marseille are Dijon and Lyon. Between Chicago and Milwaukee are Franksville, Caledonia and Pleasant Prairie.
A more apropos comparison is Paris-Lyon-Marseilles (480 miles, 14 million people) to Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison-Minneapolis (430 miles, 14.9 million people).
A train from Detroit-Chicago-Milwaukee-Minneapolis would in a single 700 mile line cover 1/3 the population of France.
NYC is the largest city in the US and the economic capital. DC is the political capital. Both are huge tourist destinations. There are myriad reasons people travel between them. Minneapolis to Detroit, much less so. The 16 non stop flights (8 each way) between Detroit and Minneapolis probably cover most the needs without an infrastructure project that would cost tens or hundred of billions of dollars.
Since when do we only connect the largest city and the capital? If that's what we did, there would be no trains in France because Paris is basically the only economically important city in the whole country.
Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis and their metro areas together have $900 billion in GDP (about 1/3 the whole GDP of France) and several dozen Fortune 500 companies. There aren't three cities together anywhere in France that have comparable economic importance.[1] Yet, there are trains between a whole bunch of these French cities.
[1] France's second largest city, Lyon, has about the same GDP as Milwaukee or Kansas City.
Because of their unique positions of power, NYC and DC are useful to connect. Minneapolis and Detroit are already connected by rail, train, bus, and car. If you want to spend a hundred billion dollars, the you need to justify it by showing that there some pent up demand for travel along the route, or some gross inefficiency that HSR will correct. GDP isn't a statistic you can substitute for number of daily trips. It is ultimately about how many people ride the train vs how much it costs, right?
One of the major observations about transport is that it's a "build it and they will come" sort of thing. Creating efficient transport links can create demand for travel (just as how if you build more roads, people drive more).
GDP is a better thing to look at then current demand because it gives you an idea of the economic capacity of the region to create demand for travel, on the presumption that demand for travel is intrinsically roughly proportional to economic activity. It's a counter-point to the common refrain that American cities are insufficiently dense and near to support high speed rail. If I can get a high speed train from Frankfurt (GDP: $220 billion) to Paris (GDP: $560 billion), distance 460 miles, why can't I get a high speed train from Detroit (GDP: $250 billion) to Chicago (GDP: $570 billion), distance 280 miles? Why would the demand for travel between the latter pair of cities be intrinsically lower than the demand for travel between the former pair?
The larger point is that while the U.S. may be too big to support HSR criss-crossing from NYC to LA or Atlanta to Seattle, it is divided into several mega-regions, each of which have economic density not that different from that of European countries.
Boston-NYC-PHL-DC, Vancouver-Seattle-Portland, Detroit-Chicago-Minneapolis, Birmingham-Atlanta-Raleigh, even Houston-Dallas-Oklahoma City all link population centers that are roughly the same size and same distance apart as major European cities.
Sure would be nice if the prices were more competitive. You can still get in & out of DC round trip for about half the price of a one-way Acela trip (from Boston). Not worth the premium in most cases... but I want to like it!
So booking a random trip: Wed Mar. 6 to Fri. Mar. 8. For business hours flights (leaving NY at 2 pm, returning at 9AM) I can get UAL for $175 round trip. But that's JFK <-> IAD. But Midtown to JFK is a $50 35 minute cab ride, and Dulles to downtown DC is an $80 40 minute cab ride. Add in an hour at the airport in JFK and half an hour getting out of IAD, you're looking at $305 round trip, and 4 hours for each leg. The Acela Express will get you downtown to downtown for $300 even ($150 each way) in three hours including boarding time/disembark time at each station. The Northeast Regional will get you there for $100 round trip in three and a half hours including boarding/disembark time.
Yep, I was talking about DC, which (from memory) was $279 each way on Acela, but only $140 round trip on Jet Blue into Reagan.
Sounds good to NYC though—I will consider it for sure.
Also, you highlight an interesting deficiency of the Acela: it's only 30 minutes difference in time. On the BOS->DC route it's only a 70 minute advantage on a ~6.5 hour trip. Sort of makes HSR seem unnecessary when compared to "slow" standard regional train service. It's just not that much better.
They need true grade-separated modern HSR on this route. It would be excellent.
I was talking DC to NYC. It can be $250, but there are $150 Acela trains spaced throughout the day. There is a 10 am Acela for $150 that gets you there into DC in time for a late lunch or afternoon meeting. The best part is: you can actually schedule that lunch and count on probably being able to make it.
I can't help but be skeptical when it costs from 3-7 times more than the bus and is only 20-30 minutes shorter of a trip. Of course, it's far more comfortable, but for a 3-5 hr trip, the trade-off is well worth it.
If you book in advance, the Northeast Regional is $50 each way from NYC to DC, versus about $30 for the Washington Deluxe bus. And a far more comfortable trip that's less likely to get stuck in traffic.
Oh, I honestly didn't know the train was that cheap when you book in advance. I've only ever booked the week of.
Still, it's like an hour longer of a trip than the bus. (I guess I haven't had bad experiences with traffic--on my last trip to Boston, we arrived early.)
No traffic delays. Important to consider if you're in town for a meeting.
Another reason to be skeptical is that the longest existing HST line is still only 1/2 as long as the distance from NYC to Los Angeles. If the USA is really interested in country wide coverage like that, it would be unprecedented.
You're right, Amtrak in the Northeast isn't very good. It's the only mode of transportation that completely prohibits carriage of bicycles. And simultaneously one of the few major rail services in the world to do so.
And by 2035, they are planning to get the WiFi working properly.