Is High Speed Rail a good idea?

[alfred russel]

The point is, how do you commute to work when just getting to and from bus/train stations is already a long walk through streets designed for cars?  Transit stops need to be densely spaced for them to be effective, and those densely-spaced stops should be in densely populated areas to be cost-effective.

You drive to them. It isn't easy getting around in the downtowns of a lot of cities that are based on the car. Or getting to the downtowns at rush hour.

[Sheilbh]

Berk's argument is why a LA-LV line makes sense I believe it's got a lot of short-haul flights that would be perfectly suited for high-speed rail.  For myself I'd take a train over a plane any time if it's (as it normally is) same price or cheaper and not too much more time travelling.  It's far more comfortable.

[Martinus]

Depending on how much it costs to maintain I think high speed railways can be a good idea. It could solve a lot of congestion issues around some of the major cities in the US. And it would also allow people to live farther away from those cities and still commute.

The problem is that it doesn't seem like this high speed rail is meant to cut congestion around cities, but rather connect large metro areas to other large metro areas.

Which perhaps is fine - but why? Why does the Bay Area need high speed rail connecting it to Sacramento? What is the gain there?

Certainly there is one, but I don't really know what it is. Right now if you want to make the trip it is a pretty straighforward drive in a car on excellent roads. Not much in the way of traffic, except actually within the metro areas themselves.

Or if you want to go faster, you take a plane.

High speed rail would obviously fall in between, but is there really that much demand? I don't really think people commute from Sacramento to San Jose, for example, so who is going to be using this rail?

Cost and speed aren't the only criteria taken into account when choosing a means of transport. There are others, such as convenience (trains are better than the other two), ability to work (you can't work while driving a car; you cant use your mobile or wifi on a plane), fuel consumption (you want to reduce your reliance on Saudi oil, remember?)

Plus in terms of speed, fast trains are way more efficient on medium-short distances than planes - just look at connections in Western Europe - anyone in their right mind traveling between London and Paris for example would choose a train over a plane because the wait associated with plane travel exceeds any delay due to trains traveling at a slower speed.

[Tonitrus]

We don't have any rail in Whitehorse, and we manage.

Sled dog traffic is easy to manage.

[Duque de Bragança]

We don't have high speed rail in Sweden and we manage.

Leave your beloved animals for a while

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_2000

It's still faster than what passes for high speed in the US.

[Zanza]

R&D so that when we're ready for high speed inter-city rail we can go all the way to maglev(or even magtube) lines.

There is already a maglev rail in Shanghai (built to our great shame with German technology that was never implemented here).

[Zanza]

I think it's a very good investment if it's practical.  However, I wonder if it's too late for most cities.  If the city never had effective mass transit, then it probably sprawled when developing.  If the city is sprawling, then can you still have an effective mass transit system?  Don't they generally require a certain population density before being useful?

Yes. That's actually a considerable problem for European cities. Population density is sinking in quite a few areas as space per person increases whereas household size decreases. A lot of singles living in an area means that public transport is less efficient.

[Grey Fox]

We don't have any rail in Whitehorse, and we manage.

You wouldn't manage without the Iceroads tho. Well, whitehorse might. Yellowknife would be inexistant.

[Berkut]

Plus in terms of speed, fast trains are way more efficient on medium-short distances than planes - just look at connections in Western Europe - anyone in their right mind traveling between London and Paris for example would choose a train over a plane because the wait associated with plane travel exceeds any delay due to trains traveling at a slower speed.

Fair enough, but I assume there is an amount of routine travel between Paris and London (two of the larger cities in the world, and both destinations for work and liesure in their own rights) to warrant such a connection. How many people travel between those two cities each day?

How many people travel between the Bay Area and Sacramento each day?

I don't think the two really compare.

[Viking]

Plus in terms of speed, fast trains are way more efficient on medium-short distances than planes - just look at connections in Western Europe - anyone in their right mind traveling between London and Paris for example would choose a train over a plane because the wait associated with plane travel exceeds any delay due to trains traveling at a slower speed.

Fair enough, but I assume there is an amount of routine travel between Paris and London (two of the larger cities in the world, and both destinations for work and liesure in their own rights) to warrant such a connection. How many people travel between those two cities each day?

How many people travel between the Bay Area and Sacramento each day?

I don't think the two really compare.

Fair enough, but the thing is that high speed rail is worthwhile even between smaller cities. It's not just between Paris and London or Barcelona and Madrid or Lyon and Paris or Milan and Rome with 500 or so flights per day, but also say Trondheim - Oslo (over/through the Dovre Mountains) and Oslo - Stockholm with 30 flights per day.

Shorter distances are even more economical, since at shorter distances the train is quicker than the plane and faster than the car.

[Admiral Yi]

Fair enough, but the thing is that high speed rail is worthwhile even between smaller cities. It's not just between Paris and London or Barcelona and Madrid or Lyon and Paris or Milan and Rome with 500 or so flights per day, but also say Trondheim - Oslo (over/through the Dovre Mountains) and Oslo - Stockholm with 30 flights per day.

Shorter distances are even more economical, since at shorter distances the train is quicker than the plane and faster than the car.

There's enough daily traffic between Oslo and Stockholm to make line self-sustaining?

[Caliga]

A problem with this approach is that cities that currently have poor public transportation may not have means of maintaining the new public transportation once it has been built for them.  In Detroit we just built a 22.5 million dollar bus shelter with Federal and State Grants.  So far it's given muggers a warmer working environment.

This is a tremendous problem with many government spending initiatives.

Case in point:  The government via a grant from FEMA or DHS or some other related agency bought a number of brand new mobile disaster response command vehicles for southern Indiana a few years back, deployed to counties which have had nearly annual flooding issues.

But they didn't establish any kind of budget to support those vehicles in any way.  Most of the county governments, which are already strapped for cash, refused to allocate budget money for the vehicles, which they didn't even lobby for in the first place.

Result: Most of the county governments have a pool of command vehicles that have broken communications equipment that nobody knows how to fix, or have no budget to retain employees to actually operate the vehicles, or retrain existing employees on them.  So most of these vehicles are sitting around in municipal parking lots taking up space, and were not used in any way in the August 2009 floods that devastated three southern Indiana counties.  Oh, and the area got no FEMA disaster relief money because the county emergency managers didn't bother to file a claim on behalf of their constituents--Louisville had flooding issues on a smaller scale, but bothered to apply, so got abundant recovery funding.

[Viking]

Fair enough, but the thing is that high speed rail is worthwhile even between smaller cities. It's not just between Paris and London or Barcelona and Madrid or Lyon and Paris or Milan and Rome with 500 or so flights per day, but also say Trondheim - Oslo (over/through the Dovre Mountains) and Oslo - Stockholm with 30 flights per day.

Shorter distances are even more economical, since at shorter distances the train is quicker than the plane and faster than the car.

There's enough daily traffic between Oslo and Stockholm to make line self-sustaining?

The main problem with the Oslo Stockholm line is the inability of the Norwegian State and Swedish State Rail Companies to cooperate. They have two different standards on fast strains (not the true high speed, but rather the modified high speed like the X2000). Furthermore, economic nationalism in norway prevents cooperating with swedish companies (who seem to want to do business) and thus results in less traffic.  If anything flight traffic oslo-stockholm would be less than oslo-stavanger, oslo-bergen, oslo-trondheim or even oslo-bodø or oslo-tromsø in the far north


Just checked
Oslo-Trondheim 11+9 = 20
Oslo-Stockholm 5+9 = 14
on this coming monday.

[BuddhaRhubarb]

It should be priority one in Canada. More and faster (and cheaper!)  trains would make Canada that much more awesome. we have room for it, and the resources. But our rail as is is stuck in the mindset of 40 years ago. probably never happen.

[Hansmeister]

There are only two profitable rail lines in the entire world.  Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyons.  So the idea that new rail lines being discussed could ever make a return on investment is nonsense even under the most optimistic scenarios.  And since you'll still need a car at both ends of the trip in most circumstances means that it isn't even practical for most people even if the tickets are subsidized.

Indeed, the lefts fascination with mass transit has an aspect of religious fanaticism, they tend to believe in its efficacy despite all evidence to the contrary.  Mass transit is only sensibly in very limited environments.

If we want some automated transit system to compete with the automobile the only sensible one would be an individual rail transit.  elevated rail lines connecting neighborhoods to commercial districts along already existing streets with customers ordering individual cars as needed via cell phone to the nearest stop in their neighborhood.  Top speed of about 35 mph would suffice.  It would be much more useful at a similar price.