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High speed rail

HSR is inherently, not cost effective, for the majority of situations.
Why is this so difficult to understand?

It's difficult to understand because it's not true, and you just keep on making stuff up to support your wild personal belief. Just because you, personally, live somewhere that has no shortage of parking (ie, no city in the world), and because you can afford to have a car (which a great many Americans cannot), does not mean you speak for the whole country. You have nothing to base this position on, and no, the one post above about relative prices for a train ride and a flight are not proof at all. There's all kinds of government subsidies and the like that make air travel cheaper. That information has nothing to do with the true cost.

Millions of Americans use rail every day, and it's a great boon. Affordable and quick travel beyond one's immediate area could mobilize the workforce, and allow people to get from place to place for their jobs. Locality of work is a huge problem for a lot of lower class workers in this country. Giving them the opportunity to go where the work is, without having to move their families and their lives to a new area... Could make a huge difference in reinvigorating the economy and building up the lower class into members of the middle class.
 
Land area of Japan: 146,000 sq. miles
Population density: 873 per sq. mile

Land area of United States: 3,974,000 sq. miles
Population density: 87 per sq. mile

So the US has 27 times the land area as Japan, and Japan has 10x the population density. Believe me, I'd love to see hordes of Americans stuffed into mass transit like sardines, Tokyo-style, but I have to admit there may be any number of reasons hi-speed monorails work for Japan that might not translate over to the US.

This is true - but it doesn't negate that high-speed rail could be very effective on a regional basis. The East Coast already has effective rail systems that would be even more effective were they modernized.

Connections between say - Chicago and large cities in the region like Indy, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cincinatti, and St. Louis could create an even more effective Midwestern commercial hub and increase regional tourism and travel, boosting the economy of the region.

You don't have to connect NY and LA where flight is much more efficient. But connecting regional cities where driving is tiresome and flight aren't cost effective and you could create a series of effective transportation hubs.
 
Should it be built? Is it a boon, or a boondoggle?

Here's an article about the subject in California:




Which leads one to say, "boondoggle."

but, one argument for "boon"



On the other hand:


and further:



better to spend 98 billion than 170, but how realistic is that?

and this article claims:



However, it also says:



The first stage calls for a train from Fresno to Corcoran. Now, I live just south of Fresno, in fact between Fresno and Corcoran, and have since 1974. In that time, I've never yet had occasion to go to Corcoran.

The plan is to continue the rail to Bakersfield. At least, more people have heard of that one. I've been through Bakersfield on the way to Los Angeles, but have never been there except maybe to stop for a burger or something.

But, the feds are adamant that the line go through the valley instead of connecting places most of the country has heard of, like, say for example, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

I have my doubts, frankly.

and $98B? Could it be better spent, or perhaps not spent at all since both the federal and state government is broke?

What do you say?

We can talk about high-speed rail after all our children can read English before they graduate highschool.
 
Land area of Japan: 146,000 sq. miles
Population density: 873 per sq. mile

Land area of United States: 3,974,000 sq. miles
Population density: 87 per sq. mile

So the US has 27 times the land area as Japan, and Japan has 10x the population density. Believe me, I'd love to see hordes of Americans stuffed into mass transit like sardines, Tokyo-style, but I have to admit there may be any number of reasons hi-speed monorails work for Japan that might not translate over to the US.

I've seen this land mass argument before and I can't understand how that is used as a negative. More land mass to cover means you are in more dire need of faster transit to get across it. The population density I get. But that is taking the approach that it is a short distance transit to work. I'm viewing it as a replacement for flying on a plane over larger distances. If people are making airline travel profitable, then it will make 310 mph nonstop train travel profitable. Especially when the news covers the next horrifying airline crash.
 
I've seen this land mass argument before and I can't understand how that is used as a negative. More land mass to cover means you are in more dire need of faster transit to get across it. The population density I get. But that is taking the approach that it is a short distance transit to work. I'm viewing it as a replacement for flying on a plane over larger distances. If people are making airline travel profitable, then it will make 310 mph nonstop train travel profitable. Especially when the news covers the next horrifying airline crash.

Only one train can cover one spot on the tracks. In the air, you can stack 4-5 planes in the same airspace at different altitudes.
 
Only one train can cover one spot on the tracks. In the air, you can stack 4-5 planes in the same airspace at different altitudes.

Yes, but we generally don't. Plus there is no free flight.
 
Only one train can cover one spot on the tracks. In the air, you can stack 4-5 planes in the same airspace at different altitudes.

Matter's not. They can only take off one at a time and land one at a time. And maglev trains can be closer to one-another on the tracks than planes can be to each other in the sky.
 
I've seen this land mass argument before and I can't understand how that is used as a negative. More land mass to cover means you are in more dire need of faster transit to get across it.

A sense of need for the convenience doesn't make there be enough money to create it.

I'm viewing it as a replacement for flying on a plane over larger distances. If people are making airline travel profitable, then it will make 310 mph nonstop train travel profitable.

That's a non-sequitur. You're ignoring any concrete financial or market analyses of this sort of travel and making reaching assumptions. And air travel is having a harder and harder time being profitable. The cost of building and maintaining the track for, say, a mag-lev train that spans hundreds or thousands of miles is immense. It doesn't cost anything to have an atmosphere.

Especially when the news covers the next horrifying airline crash.

High speed train crashes would be equally horrifying and they're more susceptible to terrorism because you can't guard that much track very easily.

I'm just saying... I understand the temptation to see something that looks like a great idea and want to have that option. I'd love to have that option. I hate flying. I live in Alaska and I have no choice but to fly or take a very slow ferry. Alaskans are gouged because many towns have no road south (or if they do it snakes through the Yukon and takes 4 days). I'd love for them to build a frictionless tubular mag-lev pod transport capable of supersonic speeds the zips us through the Canadian Rockies to get home, but let's be honest, it's a pipe dream (hyuk hyuk, a pun!). It really is. And even in flat populated areas of the country, I have to think there are very real reasons we don't have high speed public transit infrastructure. Cold, hard, mathematical and financial reasons. We're too spread out, and gasoline is still too cheap.
 
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A sense of need for the convenience doesn't make there be enough money to create it.

That's a non-sequitur. You're ignoring any concrete financial or market analyses of this sort of travel and making reaching assumptions. And air travel is having a harder and harder time being profitable. The cost of building and maintaining the track for, say, a mag-lev train that spans hundreds or thousands of miles is immense. It doesn't cost anything to have an atmosphere.



High speed train crashes would be equally horrifying and they're more susceptible to terrorism because you can't guard that much track very easily.

I'm just saying... I understand the temptation to see something that looks like a great idea and want to have that option. I'd love to have that option. I hate flying. I live in Alaska and I have no choice but to fly or take a very slow ferry. Alaskans are gouged because many towns have no road south (or if they do it snakes through the Yukon and takes 4 days). I'd love for them to build a frictionless tubular mag-lev pod transport capable of supersonic speeds the zips us through the Canadian Rockies to get home, but let's be honest, it's a pipe dream (hyuk hyuk, a pun!). It really is. And even in flat populated areas of the country, I have to think there are very real reasons we don't have high speed public transit infrastructure. Cold, hard, mathematical and financial reasons. We're too spread out, and gasoline is still too cheap.


The mere fact that:

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (RITA | BTS | Transtats), a total of 631,939,829 passengers boarded domestic flights in the United States in the year 2010. This averages to 1.73 million passengers flying per day.
link...

Means the market is there for it. I don't think it would supplant the airline travel coast to coast but I do believe it could do extremely well in the vertical travel over the US on the East and West coasts.

Maintaining track as I mentioned before could be a matter of a per-ticket fee where the government owns and maintains the track much like they do the interstate system and then have the airlines or whatever companies who want to, build the trains and run them on there. Have a percentage of each passenger ticket sold go towards track space rent for maintenance. I understand your concern with track maintenance being expensive due to distance covered and whatnot but they maintain the highways and I'd have to see comparative numbers that show airline maintenance costs would be any cheaper. Regardless, the percentage ticket sold for track rent to cover maintenance would make that point moot.

As far as gas being too cheap... It'd be a monumental failure to wait until gas is unaffordable to then act. Waiting until after a crises to act is not a reasonable way for our country to approach our future.
 
Yes, but we generally don't. Plus there is no free flight.
yes, they do, and trains won't be free either...
and there will still be airport-like security measures to deal with. High speed trains for commuting to work and back are feasible in the bay area of San Francisco, and other highly populated areas, but the main reason we don't have them elsewhere is that the economics don't work. The taxpayers end up subsidizing the riders, even tho most riders CAN pay more, they won't be asked to.
Security for air is mostly at the airport, security on the ground will include every foot of track.
Most people don't live so far from work that HSR makes sense, by the time they are up to speed, they are slowing down getting ready to stop.
 
I've seen this land mass argument before and I can't understand how that is used as a negative. More land mass to cover means you are in more dire need of faster transit to get across it. The population density I get. But that is taking the approach that it is a short distance transit to work. I'm viewing it as a replacement for flying on a plane over larger distances. If people are making airline travel profitable, then it will make 310 mph nonstop train travel profitable. Especially when the news covers the next horrifying airline crash.
we are in the information age, for a lot of us it makes more sense to work at home, telecommuting....
 
we are in the information age, for a lot of us it makes more sense to work at home, telecommuting....

True. But do you want America to just give up on any manufacturing? Still the stats say 1.73 million people fly every day. Don't know what you want to tell them to do but I'd be willing to bet they are still going to travel to where they intend to travel to for whatever reasons they are doing it for.
 
True. But do you want America to just give up on any manufacturing? Still the stats say 1.73 million people fly every day. Don't know what you want to tell them to do but I'd be willing to bet they are still going to travel to where they intend to travel to for whatever reasons they are doing it for.

You can build a mile of runway to take you anywhere in the world. You can build 1000 miles of track that will only go 2 places.
 
You can build a mile of runway to take you anywhere in the world. You can build 1000 miles of track that will only go 2 places.

Kind of a piss-poor comparative and you know it. One is an embedded and established form of travel and one isn't. So using your comparative, we should never do anything new because established systems are already built and have a head start so... why try?

One track vs. how many decades of building airports? Come on man.
 
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This is destined to be another major boondoggle that will never,ever make a penny. Amtrak is loosing it's ass and have to be financially supported constantly.

In California the Car is still king and people like the independence even as the State Assembly, and Bureaucracies are doing their level best to price people off the roads.

This is another prime example why reason has to replace the craziness that has taken over The California Government and a lot of the Federal Government.

When is America going to wake up and smell the reality that spending on programs we don't need for people who won't use it, are always going to fail. This type of craziness sounds great and to some idealistic empty headed dolts they are like a Religion.
 
We can talk about high-speed rail after all our children can read English before they graduate highschool.

We've already crossed that bridge, and it has absolutely nothing to do with HSR. Did you think that we could spend the money on education instead and have a better outcome? Throwing money at a problem like improving education doesn't work.
 
This is destined to be another major boondoggle that will never,ever make a penny. Amtrak is loosing it's ass and have to be financially supported constantly.

In California the Car is still king and people like the independence even as the State Assembly, and Bureaucracies are doing their level best to price people off the roads.

This is another prime example why reason has to replace the craziness that has taken over The California Government and a lot of the Federal Government.

When is America going to wake up and smell the reality that spending on programs we don't need for people who won't use it, are always going to fail. This type of craziness sounds great and to some idealistic empty headed dolts they are like a Religion.

If we were to quit subsidizing oil, would automobile travel be so affordable? I wonder.
 
It should get built where it is NEEDED, not just wanted.
 
Our country has put off infrastructure development long enough. Our's is an aging one. While even developing nations soar ahead of us in railway development, we're sorely lagging behind.

So, your solution is to spend money that we don't have, that is many times what it would take to fix our existing infrastructure, to create a whole new bunch of infrastructure that will be even more expensive to maintain than the infrastructure we are already not maintaining properly?
 
Yes, but we generally don't. Plus there is no free flight.
Are you saying HSR would be free? If so how do you pay for the supposed expansion and why put posibly trillions of dollars into something that their will be little or no payback for if it is free?
 
Initial costs would definitely cost. Once we started linking major metropolitan areas together, ticket fees could definitely start funding the growth of the tracks' expansions. The more track, the more revenue, the more it can expand independent of new tax or new deficit spending.

You're assuming people will want to ride these things.
Amtrak isn't really doing all that well.

This is a multi-trillion dollar project.
 
Sure glad our country didn't take this mentality when we build the Hoover dam the Tennessee Valley Authority that pretty much gave electricity to the bulk of the South, and our interstate system. We need a bit more from our government and our expectations of it other than government = evil and can't do anything because history says otherwise.

Faulty comparison.
HSR /= Hoover damn or the TVA.

Glad you aren't understanding my argument at all.
HSR systems are not a cure all to transportation issues, the whole U.S. over.

They work in very specific circumstances, not in all circumstances.
 
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It's difficult to understand because it's not true, and you just keep on making stuff up to support your wild personal belief. Just because you, personally, live somewhere that has no shortage of parking (ie, no city in the world), and because you can afford to have a car (which a great many Americans cannot), does not mean you speak for the whole country. You have nothing to base this position on, and no, the one post above about relative prices for a train ride and a flight are not proof at all. There's all kinds of government subsidies and the like that make air travel cheaper. That information has nothing to do with the true cost.

Millions of Americans use rail every day, and it's a great boon. Affordable and quick travel beyond one's immediate area could mobilize the workforce, and allow people to get from place to place for their jobs. Locality of work is a huge problem for a lot of lower class workers in this country. Giving them the opportunity to go where the work is, without having to move their families and their lives to a new area... Could make a huge difference in reinvigorating the economy and building up the lower class into members of the middle class.

I don't have to speak for the whole country to know that, HSR is not universally cost effective.
The United States does not have a magical copy and paste option that can fit HSR in every location and it work well.

Some Americans, in very specific areas, use rail.
That does not mean that it can fit in every little nook and cranny you can devise.

Your arguments are just another representation of the fallacy of a single cause.
 
put in a monorail magnetic levitating train from DC to Atlanta (661 miles) traveling at 310 mph and see how many airline flights get grounded due to lack of use. An 11 hour drive by car according to google cut to around 2 hours on this train:



It's not a car ride. It's on a monorail riding nonstop over traffic. Not across roads. like other North American trains. It's nonstop, 310 mph to your destination. Not much slower than a passenger jet flies but much faster boarding, unboarding and take off with no delays due to weather or tarmac traffic.


Again, you're missing the cost factor. No one will use it when its cheaper to fly. To pay for this, the fare would be similar to the Acela which will be several hundred dollars. And you honestly thing the airlines will just keep fares the same if there is at all a threat to their bottom line? I'd bet most would reduce fares to be even more competitive. Furthermore, it the traffic between DC and Atlanta even remotely high enough to merit such line? The only reason Atlanta has any consideration at all would be due to the fact that its hub for several major airlines. Gonna take a train from DC to Atlanta to hop on plane?

The only region it makes sense would be the NE corridor. And as I've already shown, its both signficantly cheaper and faster to fly. Unless you're advocating a bottomless pit of government subsidation just so we can have cool fast trains zipping around.
 
You're assuming people will want to ride these things.
Amtrak isn't really doing all that well.

This is a multi-trillion dollar project.

And you are assuming people won't and then trying to back that up with a false comparison to Amtrak. There is no comparison. A rather slow train on a track =/= 310 mph monorail nonstop to your destination. Apples and oranges.
 
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