Rayeli

Pretty much every single one of those points are wrong. It’s definitely not cheaper, definitely not more efficient (moving up to 500 people at once instead of 76 per hour on an E175), safety is debatable, but flying is definitely not faster in the grand scheme of things (going from downtown to downtown and of the distance of the NE corridor except maybe BOS-DCA). When you factor in traveling to/from the airport, going early for security, etc.

For example in France, Paris to Lyon is roughly the same distance as Boston to Philadelphia. Air France blocks the flight as 1 hr 5 min ($128). The train (from downtown to downtown) is 1 hr 57 min ($52). Which would you take?

Again, this is in a corridor where there’s a dedicated high speed train line pretty much the whole way and the train can hit its top speed (186 mph) for the majority of the trip.

galaxy flyer

When there’s a 186mph corridor from Boston to Phillie, get back to us. When the TGV was built, a dedicated railway was possible, that hasn’t been possible in the NE since about 1930.

GF

Excargodog

Of course it is cheaper. You have to take into account the capital cost.
The CHEAPEST section of the California high speed rail - the part built mostly over agricultural land 163 miles between Bakersfield and Merced - is now well north of $13.5 billion. That’s $83 million per mile. A high speed rail corridor in the Northeast, or in any of the more highly populated areas of the country, would cost far more per mile. US LIGHT RAIL costs between $15 million and $100 million per mile.


Of course it’s safer. We kill about 300 people a year at railroad crossings in the US. AMTRAK passenger trains, because of their higher speeds, kill a disproportionate share of those.

And of course it’s more efficient. Efficiency is ultimately a function of the mass you accelerate and decelerate. You are moving 76 people using 40 tons of aircraft versus 500 people with 540 tons, the weight of one Amtrak locomotive and six cars.

Now I’ll concede the time issue with security, but it will take only one mass murder on a passenger train to equalize that.

Macchi30

I definitely would. Trains are more convenient. They take you right to city center, and you also don’t have to show up to the train station 2-3 hours early for security screenings. I live in the DC area and it would be way easier and cheaper to take the train (if we have true HSR) from Union Station to Penn Station than to fly out of IAD or DCA to LGA or JFK.

Macchi30

To add to that. You’d have to leave very early just to get to CDG 3 hours early with how crazy that airport is. Whereas you could arrive at Gare Du Nord just minutes before train departure and be perfectly fine. So in a way, it’s still less time consuming to use the train

Duffman

HSR definitely has a place in urban design, but the cost can't be justified, which has been explained ad-naseum. For air travel, all you need are two airports and if the route is no longer profitable, you just fly to a different airport. Aviation's big advantage is its flexibility.

To be honest, I don't think HSR will ever catch on in the US because there is too much competition to justify the immense buy-in required to build that level of infrastructure. The entire US infrastructure is designed around Eisenhower-era freeways, which solidified cars/trucks as the US' choice of transportation, probably until we get those people-moving tubes from Futurama. Our cities are built on a hollow, urban core/suburbia model that has made cars a necessity in the vast majority of the US' major cities, whereas Europe and Asia have designed cities in a way that cars are instead a luxury. If people aren't relying on public transit as their sole means, then there goes most of your demand for HSR and then it's just a near-peer competitor for air travel with an obscenely high sunk cost.

I think the Green New Deal created a lot of interest in HSR, but I think very few people have actually read it. Here's the source document; it's not long (https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/h...6hres109ih.pdf). I was a civil engineer before I became a pilot and I think their solutions are vastly impractical and written by people who don't know the first thing about construction. As a moderate, neutral party, it wasn't even a thinly veiled Trojan Horse for socialism to me (Just read page 11-14 in its entirety, it's double spaced with huge margins).

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for sustainability, I just don't think HSR is the answer for the US. But we already have a very cheap, functional system in place, so I think we'd be better off trying to improve what we already have. For example, if we could figure out energy storage, rooftop solar panels could power your house, charge your car, provide hot water, etc. Then we'd be 90% on our way to complete sustainability without really changing the American way. I'm not saying this is THE solution, I'm just using it as an example.

Macchi30

Yes but one day this will be forced to change. As our population grows rapidly, there are more and more cars on the road. Eventually our roadways will be so saturated with cars it will be impossible to get anywhere. Where I live I can already see commute times increasing over the past few years. Yeah it’s expensive, but by not “jumping on the train” now, we are just hindering our future QOL when it will be even harder to make these changes.


Futurama transporters would be awesome btw

rickair7777

Self-driving cars can accomplish the same thing as local trains, even better. In "local mode" they get you to and from your home/job/shopping mall to the main artery, which you'd need to do with rail anyway.

Then once on the artery (freeway) they can drive a lot more efficiently than human drivers... a lot faster, closer, and without any need for traffic lights. Instead of stop and go, they would simply coordinate with each other (or be centrally coordinated) to go at a speed that maximizes throughput while allowing on/off ramps to function smoothly.

That would buy us a lot of bandwidth. Very long-term, the solution is probably under-grounding most local roads in metro areas, so the surface would be more green and park-like (also frees up real estate for housing). Not cheap or easy, but could be done in the very long haul. Electric vehicles make it more practical (no emissions to ventilate). Such a network could designed from the ground up for smooth autonomous flow. Your garage would be underground, or more likely rather than owning one, you'd just catch the next available pod, so it would work like a train but with individual routing and timing. If not stops at each house, there would be one every block or two.

The challenge to that is that AI is nowhere near ready to replace human drivers in the real world, and nobody even has any idea how to get there. The workout around to that is freeways modified to accommodate self-driving cars operating within set parameters, ie remove the unexpected factors which AI can't cope with. A virtual concrete rail line if you will. Probably require autonomous mode on freeways, at least during rush hour.

You'd probably have to drive manually on the surface streets, AI can't deal with the myriad unexpected factors you find in the local neighborhood (unless you totally ban all pedestrians, kids pets, bikes, scooters, human drivers, etc).

rickair7777

Tesla "autopilot" issues...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-t...-idUSKCN1VO22E

Slaphappy

actually it is cheaper, the cost to fly is cheaper on a per mile basis than taking the train is. You're not going to find a train ticket from orlando to Chicago for 100 bucks like you do on many airlines.
Efficiency is more than just the number of people you can haul around, it's also about the time and cost. Again aviation is proven to more than rail. A rail network like and airline network is not possible. It's much easier to create an airline network overnight than it is to plan and lay track for rail route.


Air France also has a monopoly on that route. I also looked on the SNCF website and the cheapest I found was 97 euro. If you also reread my orginal post you would see that I said that over a couple hundred miles is where these advantages are the most pronounced. The thing is we're in the US not in France. France is the size of about texas, if the US population lived in that small of a footprint.