I understand that California High Speed Rail isn't a popular project on HN, but to claim that it hasn't broken ground is just wrong. There are numerous completed structures and a clear plan to get high-speed trains running from Merced to Bakersfield by 2030.
I will admit to never visiting either city, but my impression is that they are car dependent without major subway service? Probably some bus line with very local service?
It’s like 2-3 hr drive between the two cities, and at both end you have to navigate auto transport, most likely a rental though maybe Uber would work out but at greater cost for anything beyond a single destination. I would imagine most people would just opt to drive, since they need a car at either end of that line?
The ultimate plan is LA->SJ, which is a reasonable compromise and avoids a lot of the reasons why connecting to SF directly via HSR is impractical (it would essentially require a complete reworking of Caltrain to accommodate HSR trains, because there's no alternative anyone would accept to build another parallel rail line up the peninsula).
Not sure what you mean - California HSR trains will go into San Francisco as part of Phase 1 (which is really the second phase, the Initial Operating Segment (IOS) I guess is like Phase 0). They're doing electrification and upgrades of Caltrain there to accommodate it.
Between Sacramento and Merced, and LA and Bakersfield, there will be a "high speed rail bus service". For other parts there will be regional commuter train and bus services.
Yup. And the station in Los Angeles will be far east of downtown. So if you take Amtrak into LA you'll have to take a taxi or a bus to further transfer to Los Vegas.
Also, for the Las Vegas link, the terminus is on the Metrolink line so you can take a commuter train from Union Station. People taking Amtrak from points east could get off at the Ontario station and it’s a relatively short taxi/bus ride to the RC terminal (Amtrak uses a different set of tracks coming into L.A. from the east than the Metrolink station serving RC). I suppose it would be feasible to extend the line a little further south to connect with Amtrak should there be demand (if they went to the Ontario station, then the Ontario airport could also be integrated into the service).
the CAHSR station is at LA's Union station, which I think is the context of this set of comments. The line to Vegas (brightline west) does indeed end (for now) in Rancho Cucamonga with plans to continue on to LA's Union Station
That Merced to Bakersfield line is characterizes as from nowhere to nowhere in How Big Projects Get Done. It’s one of the few negative examples in the book that stuck with me. It’s embarrassing.
Merced to Bakersfield is exactly right. Build it there first, figure out how to build it, fuckup where it's cheaper and gain the experience so when you have to tear up downtown LA and SF you know what the fuck you're doing and can get in, get it done right the first time, and then get out. No one wants to live in a construction zone, but it's worse when something goes wrong and the construction zone lasts 3x longer than it has to.
On the other hand, how many additional people would be served by the infrastructure if they would just be brave and take a risk on an imperfect solution rather than bickering about it for X years or decades?
This, exactly. We Americans have very little knowledge base on how to build HSR, so it's as much a workforce training and proving ground as it is a functional line.
You would think we would just hire the dutch/swiss/italians (take your pick out of europe) to come build our HSR, similar but opposite of how we destroyed their cities when they brought in our 'traffic engineers' in the 60s and 70s.
I wouldn't say there's a technical knowledge gap insomuch as there are regulatory and political issues in the cities that need more time to resolve than building a line through farm country & desert do.
I know next to nothing about this project but isn’t this a way to build a train line somewhat cost effective? Once it exists, the land around both stations will increase in utility until it’s no longer a “nowhere”. If you build downtown to downtown you have to either dig a massive, expensive tunnel or buy up a lot of high value land or both.
Perhaps it’s won’t break even for half a century but if it eventually does, it will be a success.
It's my theory partly why China has smashed out so many thousands of km of HSR and what appear to be excessively wide highways (other than prestige and a general vibe of governance=more, bigger infrastructure). In 100 years when the ossification and NIMBYism is the norm, the rail corridor land is already there. Renovating a line that already exists may not be easy, but it's easier than prizing land out plot by plot, and even in China that's a huge hassle. Plus the hard physical bits like blasting tunnels and digging cuttings is already done before labour costs succumb to spiraling cost disease.
Then again, at about $45 million per mile, it's actually not even that much more expensive that Chinese HSR: to build the current 45000km of rail at the LV-LA price would be $1.25 trillion, which isn't vastly more than the Chinese system has cost so far. In fact it's very roughly about as much as the US spends, per year, on healthcare on top of what European countries pay for the same outcomes (total annual spending: 4.2 trillion and a bit, or 12.5k per person, vs global number two, Switzerland, at 8k: about 1/3, not far from 1.25/4.2!)
Build it and they'll come? At least one end has to be somewhere people want to be, right? A line from London into the countryside makes sense. You can live in the countryside and work in London. A line from nowhere to nowhere is a chicken/egg problem. Now if one end is an Airport and another is a new community who will have jobs at the airport, that might work.
They both are university towns (UC Merced and Cal State Bakersfield); given that academics are generally positively inclined towards public transit a line could encourage collaborations, I suppose.
I agree. I can imagine tourists traveling to Merced to see the high speed rail in all its glory. Bakersfield is already a hot tourist destination because of Buck Owens and The Hag, but adding high speed rail will make it even more attractive as a “must see” attraction when visiting the golden state.
There's also a plan to connect to SF and LA eventually.
Those will be built as (if) they are funded. The only funding currently secured is the bakersfield to merced leg.
The problem is, that leg is nowhere to nowhere and is going to cost over 100B dollars. Most people take that to mean that it's incredibly unlikely that the more costly portions of the route (the ones that make it useful) will ever get built as they will be absurdly expensive.
I was just looking up the LA to SF high speed rail project because the headline sounded so wrong. It's so sad that the official website has a giant photo of their progress: a short section of clean, straight overpass over a country road, with nothing connected to either end, an island of rail infrastructure plonked down in the middle of California. Sigh.
That's the first stage of any rail project - in California they have literally build hundreds of these unconnected bridges, viaducts and embankments. Same thing with HS2 in the UK.
Connecting them all up with rails and catenary is the (relatively) cheap, quick and easy bit, and it's done at the end - it's exactly all these structures (and the stations, which will likely be the next phase) that take all the time and money.
_Presuming_ that the rest of it gets done, it likely makes a lot of sense; you get the difficult bit (starting up high speed rail construction and operation in a country, and indeed a continent, which has never done it before) out of the way in a presumably _relatively_ low-stakes section; if you're going to have teething problems, and you will, better to have them there than when you're trying to go through a mountain range.
It's ironic that Merced and Bakersfield get shit on when it's the coastal Bay Area and LA people that are the actual problems standing in the way of making the rail...
I don't know much about Merced, but the reasons that Bakersfield gets shit on have nothing to do with high speed rail and more to do with its reputation for meth, crime, and generally being a shithole to live in or even pass through. I suppose one might find this “ironic”, for very interesting definitions of “ironic”.
I'm well aware of Bakersfield's problems. And yet, the area was able to handle implementing the initial steps of high speed rail, and the Bay and LA weren't (for whatever eminent domain / NIMBY reasons). So it's funny to me to see LA/Bay people give Bakersfield crap: "ugh why is the rail over there". Well, because you LA/Bay people couldn't.
Will that segment of CAHSR be able to run at full speed? The plans have changed so much that it's hard to find a good and up to date source, but my understanding was that to save money a good chunk of phase 1 isn't going to be running at "HSR" speeds. e.g. it'll be sharing track with freight trains, and some routes were made windy-er to save money (with the side effect of limiting speeds)
I'm in the bay area and literally nothing they've designed around here is going 220mph unless they a going to be banking the tracks 40 degrees and doing a TON of ground breaking engineering around safety to run at 220 mph safely while sharing with Caltrain and other users.
That’s 50% faster than Acela (150mph) which isn’t nothing, but doesn’t make much of a difference on its own. What’s actually important is maintaining high speed for most of the trip which is where Acela fails (~70.3 mph).
> What’s actually important is maintaining high speed for most of the trip which is where Acela fails (~70.3 mph).
Reminds me of high-speed rail in France vs high-speed rail in Germany. To the point that newer Siemens trains will have a lower top-speed, because "there is no demand for it".
In France, it depends a lot on the lines : Paris-Lyon has average of 270 km/h (167 mph); Paris-Bordeaux clock at around 300 km/h (186 mph) while Paris-Brest is more at 200 (124 mph).
It is interesting to note that it often seems ti correlate to the age of the line, with Paris-Bordeaux being the most recent.
Yes, but they are limited by the technology used to build the line, and by how the lines were traced, but not because their high-speed trains need to stop at every city center or run on "winding" tracks, as is the case in Germany.
The Paris-Lyon line is by far the oldest, and is top-speed limited because of how it was traced. (And also because of its out-dated security system that is in the process of being changed)
The Paris-Brest line stops being a high-speed track in Rennes, so even if the first part is fast, it's still a long way to Brest on conventional tracks.
The newer lines are faster, as they are designed for theoretical operational speeds of 350 km/h, with a current operational top speed of 320. (LGV Sud Europe Atlantique, LGV Rhin-Rhone, LGV Est, and even the LGV Bretagne Pays-de-Loire going to Brest)
If I understand it correctly the definition of high speed rail in the UK is above 125mph. Apparently that's the fastest you can safely use conventional line side signalling (traffic lights).
Yes, that annoyed me. What they really mean is that they claim this rail line will be in operation before CA High-Speed Rail. I find that hard to believe, but I would be happy to be surprised.
While construction only just now broke ground formally, this project has been around (under different companies) since before Prop 1A for CA HSR was passed, and has already done all route planning, environmental clearance, and right-of-way acquisition, on a simpler route with fewer stations (even compared to the CA HSR Early Operating Segment, though Brightline West is longer.)
> high-speed trains running from Merced to Bakersfield
I lived in CA for 15 years. I've been all over it (incl central ca). This would be such a pyrrhic victory, that I lack words! Who the hell needs to commute enough between those two god-forsaken places to justify the billions spent on this?
So it's an important commercial route but with no passenger demand? What a geographic oddity! I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find any other examples of that, anywhere.
Not really. Cargo uses very different routes than people commonly. How many people travel from Shenzhen to the port of Oakland? Now how many cargo containers?
Nobody will use it. A majority of the demographic see it as a Washington disaster Trump stopped but Biden turned the construction back on.
Everyone owns a car and carpooling is trivial. Most homes have one car per adult.
There’s nothing of interest between Merced and Bakersfield. These were towns that grew from the old 99 freeway from Sacramento to Bakersfield and then on to LA.
Operative phrase: "see it as". I can anecdotally confirm that central-valley relatives of mine bring up HSR as a reason not to vote for Biden. The Democrat = Democrat logic is strong, I suppose, even if the ignorance about federal structure is profound.
NOBODY CARES ABOUT MERCED TO BAKERSFIELD.
that's 100k people connected to 400k people. who cares. and it will not be ready by 2030, it'll be 2033. and that means SF to LA will be at least 2040. its absolutely insane and everyone managing that project should be fired and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor.
You can get high speed rail built for people from SoCal to lose their asses at a backgammon table in Vegas faster but if you want to, idk, travel for non-recreational reasons within the Midwest and you don't want to sprint through O'Hare for a flight between where you're from and where you're going, you'll probably be driving despite years of asking for Amtrak to find a way to go above 79 MPH.
It has more to do with land. Land is cheap and easy to acquire out there. Where as anywhere in CA it is expensive. And more so if they find out you need the land to build high speed rail.
The US rail system carries a lot more cargo than in Europe. On the order of 3 times more freight per mile of track. It is an also much cheaper to send freight by rail in the US compared to Europe. Reconfiguring the US rail system to even slightly more passenger friendly would seriously lower the amount of freight that can be transported by rail, as well as raising the price, and most of that would end up on trucks.
The other aspect is how the rail infrastructure is financed in the US vs Europe. In the US the infrastructure is to a large extent funded by the freight companies themselves, and in return their needs get priority. Take away that incentive and they'll stop funding the rail infrastructure meaning that much of that cost will end up pack on either the local or federal government, with all that that entails.
One of the heaviest rail, if not the heaviest rail in Europe, is a 500km combined freight and passenger rail that goes between Sweden and Norway (The Iron Ore Line). It alone carries more than the combined weight of all rail freight transportation in Norway, and close to 50% of all rail freight transportation in Sweden. It also happens to be one of the worlds oldest railways, built in 1888.
The biggest issue is speed. The maximum speed is just slightly above that of maximum highway speed, with freight speed limited to less than half of that.
That line is fantastic for freight (unless they've derailed an ore train again...), but the passenger service it offers would feel right at home in the US when it comes to both speed and number of departures. The passenger service to Norway leaves 0-2 times a day
The line between Kiruna and Narvik is so beautiful I’m not sure why you’d want it to go faster. The speed is heavily dictated by the number of tunnels and turns due to mountainous terrain. It couldn’t be much faster without very expensive kilometer long tunnels.
Population density in North Sweden and Norway is low enough that a few times a day is probably sufficient for most local travel. I haven’t been during peak tourist seasons when that number of trains might not be enough.
A fun fact is that since the ore trains travel mostly downhill, braking generates enough electricity that the ore empty trains can return to Kiruna effectively energy free.
We have the largest rail system of any country (USA 220k km vs EU 200k km). If you include the connections we use with Mexico and Canada it’s even larger. It’s almost all entirely freight. Trains can be 2000m long compared to 700m in the EU. It’s all built for freight.
2 km long trains are not long in the US anymore; in the west 3-4 km lengths are being seen more and more often. Turns out slower, longer trains filled with bulk commodities are better for business since they don't have tight delivery deadlines. There are towns where the train comes through for 45 minutes+.
Rail operators have also discovered a really nice side effect of ultra long trains: you don't have to pull into a siding to let a passenger train by as required by law if your train is longer than the siding.
Supposedly 10% of trains in the USA are about 10,000 feet or longer. Duckduckgo tells me that's about 3km. Supposedly there's at least one train 14,000 feet or longer.
It's worth noting that talking about the 'European' rail infrastructure is a bit of a misnomer since there is no standardisation of the rail system of regulations between countries and as such moving freight across multiple countries is basically never done.
Even for passenger transport the historical legacy of national rail networks means that travel across the continent hasn't been a priority. Recently EU initiatives seek to remedy this:
"the United States is the world's largest consumer market for a reason: its rivers. Transporting goods by water is 12 times cheaper than by land (which is why civilizations have always flourished around rivers). And the United States, Zeihan calculates, has more navigable waterways — 17,600 miles' worth — than the rest of the world. By comparison, he notes, China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles. And all of the Arab world has 120 miles."
To be fair, Germany is fairly small (by US/China) standards.
The continental US (no Alaska or Hawaii) is > 22.5 times as big as Germany but has only 8.8 times as many miles of "navigable waterways." (However, it's not clear if the US numbers include the Great Lakes or the oceans; LA to Seattle and Miami to NYC goes by ocean, not some river.)
But, that doesn't leave much for the rest of Europe.
Can you name a system that moves roughly the same amount of freight as the US while still having excellent passenger service on the same rail infrastructure? Genuinely curious.
On literally the same rails, I suspect that doesn't happen that much. China moves more tonnage by rail freight than anywhere else in the world, and it has an immature-but-excellent-where-it-exists high speed system, but it doesn't generally share lines with the freight.
80% of freight is done by rail in Sweden I know nothing about logistics so this is just first hit on Google, I do not make the point to contradict you. I think the issue here is how you split up the big numbers into managable percentages for easy statistics, I'm guessing there is a lot of issues when you are talking about this. The biggest is that the US has spent 70 years of lobbying from car manufacturers and oil companies to make people use cars, that has left a scar all over the world. Not only in the freight vs. passenger statistics.
Another aspect that needs to be taken into account is that a large part (perhaps 40%) of any number you see on total tonnes of rail freight in Sweden, is made up of handful of short rail lines doing nothing but transporting iron ore from a few large mines to the nearest harbour.
It's true that the US moves more freight by rail compared to for example EU. But that doesn't mean the reason for this is the mostly excellent passenger rail system in the EU. I'm not an expert here at all, but for example this article cites a few plausible reasons: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-europe-so-absurdly-...
As your link shows, money that is spent on making a good freight rail system is mostly money that doesn't help with passenger traffic.
You claimed that there were "many" countries that had both good freight and passenger rail, but have yet to come up with one. (Sweden isn't an example - its "good freight" service (mines to ports) is where there's insignificant passenger service.)
> We should nationalize the rail infrastructure and upgrade it to make passenger traffic a first-class citizen of the rails
Your response to the first high-speed rail line America is likely to see completed, being built by a private operator, is to propose effectively banning it?
If rails are to be nationalized in the future, why would a private operator build one now? If you believe the inability to profit from the build on a recurring basis will happen, that’s an effective ban on construction of then by private operators now.
Yea but I wouldn't be so happy with nationalized rail tbh.
We have the MTA in NY, they run the railroads and subways. The agency is massively bloated by costs not just where it costs $1.5 billion per mile to expand the subway, but even the railways are bleeding billions per year.
I understand that GP commenter is referring to nationalisation of existing rail infrastructure, particularly given that the intent would be to "upgrade it to make passenger traffic a first-class citizen of the rails". That would not apply to the first high-speed rail line in America, as it already has by its very nature passenger traffic as a first-class citizen — indeed, it will almost certainly have passenger traffic as its only citizen.
1. The federal government is not noted for running passenger traffic well.
2. We don't want 40% more trucks on the roads, so we need the system to still be able to carry large amounts of freight. The federal government is also not known for doing that well, still less for balancing that with #1.
3. In this country, we don't just get to nationalize things. We have to pay for them. Given the pathetic rate at which Amtrak is funded, do you really think that Congress is going to spring for the kind of money to buy all the freight railroads?
4. Speaking of Congress, it's going to take continual funding to pay for keeping the system maintained. Do you want the annual maintenance budget for this (including the freight portion) to be at the annual whims of Congress?
I mean, first of all, doesn't it make more sense that there's more money to extract from the LA<->Vegas line? And second, Amtrak can't force CSX to upgrade its rail, and Amtrak sure as hell ain't paying.
There's loads of billionaires out there now with more money than sense. Get together a PAC, lobby them to fund high-speed rail upgrades, name a rail station after them or something.
Brightline itself is basically a property play. They buy up land around the proposed stations and then the train service makes that land more valuable and it's either leased or sold off for profit. The train is really a loss leader or breakeven proposition.
Moving people around tends to not be that great a business in general. Providing them services once they are there is a money printing machine.
Prediction: Project will take 10 years too long and results in a normal (non-high-speed) rail system connecting the two places that is too expensive for people to reasonably use.
This is a terrible prediction. This project is extremely easy in comparison to California HSR because it’s all running in the I-15 right-of-way. There’s also no reason whatsoever to think you can’t run high speed trains on this route.
> There’s also no reason whatsoever to think you can’t run high speed trains on this route.
I don't think the commenter meant this route was especially unfeasible. I think they were referring to the fact that the track record (no pun intended) of high speed rail projects in the U.S. is mixed to terrible.
Brightline's last project took like 3-4 years from groundbreaking to moving paying passengers. The LA-Vegas line is like 20% more track, but it has some other benefits that IMO will make construction easier (fewer legal challenges, right of way in or along the freeway for most of its length, singletracked)
At least in this case one of the destinations could theoretically be visited without a car (assuming these are just tourists to the Vegas Strip).
Whereas another certain California rail project literally transports you from [place you need car] to [place you need car]. Which I don’t think I need to explain why that is silly.
The root cause of this is blue states often get Euro public transport envy — yet they don’t understand Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) of the US. Obviously public transport would start to make a lot more sense if you 3X’d the population in the same land area.
IMO fetishizing the European way of life is a bit silly, given density comes with its own problems (ie nobody having kids). In fact, there was this German guy in the 1930s who led the killing of millions of people partly to get more “living space”, so European density does have its downsides for…shall we say…stability. In fact, Europe has roughly the same amount of people today as it had in 1939. Meanwhile the US has more than doubled.
Spain has similar population, area and climate to California, and even though it has less GDP it has built some good high speed trains infrastructure. I can see your point if the alternative is travelling by car, but if you're going to take planes the train can be a viable option. There are plenty of big urban centres in California that can support public transit.
I think it's interesting that this is an emotional trigger topic for HN (along with anything having to do with right to repair, digital privacy, etc).
In most things, if you post a comment with points of discussion you get a thoughtful response here.
However on HN trigger topics, you get emotionally downvoted and nobody wants to engage in discussion.
Instead of linking to a youtube video from the r/fuckcars filter bubble, is there any succinct points to refute why a 3X greater population density would not naturally result in greater public transportation formation?
Or is it just the "dumb americans" and their "evil car culture?" With no further investigation of the first-principles reasons that culture was formed?
Population density and urbanization is not equally distributed, the Eastern half of the US has a population density on par with Europe since a huge majority of Americans live there.
You are also starting from the assumption that higher population density is better for high speed rail, which is easily countered with my previous point. An argument could be made that, practically, high speed rail is really better suited to places with low population densities centered around urban areas... like the unpopulated parts of the US West.
HSR is expensive and requires high degrees of funding and coordination. In other words there has to be a strong political and cultural will behind it, so yeah, it stands to reason that the US doesn't want it since they certainly have the money to do it if they want. Maybe there is a culture around forms of transportation that is particular to the US...
What’s the population density of Madrid and Barcelona compared to Los Angeles and San Francisco?
i’ve been using this example for about a decade.
of course, that route didn’t exist 20 years ago when I took Madrid to Seville. I can’t imagine what the population density of Seville is.
it would help if you give us the numbers you’re working with. I sure hope you aren’t doing the population density of the entire country. That’s a common mistake.
How much better do you think public transportation is in the US (35 people per square kilometer) than in Finland (16 people / km²) or Sweden (24 people / km²)?
While you're checking the provided citation, you might want to compare those countries' fertility rates too (and others as well, of course – France's for instance is quite a bit higher than that of the US': 1.82 vs. 1.67). You have yet to demonstrate that your hypotheses are well supported by data.
HN'ers love fixed rail for some reason. It doesn't make any sense -- if there's a less progressive transportation modality I can't imagine what it would be -- but it's axiomatic. If you value your karma score you'll back away smiling and reach for the doorknob.
> if there's a less progressive transportation modality I can't imagine what it would be
Genuinely curious what is meant by this since if I was asked what the most progressive ideal city layout was I'd respond with extensive, highly connected, frequent metro lines with islands of density around the stations that included plenty of non-market rate housing options within easy walk of each station. When more housing is needed extend the lines and start a whole new island of density. Make sure plenty of public green space is accessible from the metros just beyond the density islands.
Inter-city connections would be broadly similar, just zoomed out. Each city an island of density connected by fast and frequent rail.
Progressive to me means, simply, "That which leaves the most options open for the most people."
Creating hardwired infrastructure to transport people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be, over timespans measured in decades for construction and a good part of a century to pay off, at a time when technology is delivering more options for individual mobility concurrent with other options that render commuting and travel less relevant, doesn't strike me as progressive.
Compared to the progressive utopia that is sitting in traffic? Passenger vehicle lanes move 1500-2000 cars per hour. Even with extensive carpooling and possible future technology that allows cars to bunch more, 10-15k people per hour is likely the limit. A double tracked train line can easily push 40-50k per hour without much stress and with grade separation can be fully automated with short dwell times and huge frequency.
I'm a huge fan of ebikes and other micromobility solutions for solving the last mile problem that has always plagued rapid transit, especially in low density areas. You want to move huge amount of people any significant distance? You need a train. Pretty much every proposal I've seen to move masses of people without a train ends up being train but worse, either in OPEX or CAPX (usually both).
Even with extensive carpooling and possible future technology that allows cars to bunch more, 10-15k people per hour is likely the limit. A double tracked train line can easily push 40-50k per hour without much stress
Of course, you're comparing a single rail line to a single road, rather than to the entire network of roads that could have been built with the same funding in a fraction of the time, but... that's why I offered the OP the advice I did.
I'm comparing roughly similar right of way width requirements. Super-wide roadways are awful for pedestrian safety and walkability since it means destinations worth going to are further apart. Using huge amounts of space for the transportation network itself puts huge limits your goal of the most options open to the most people. Trains being incredibly space efficient is why so many people love them so much. Roads for cars are the exact opposite.
When you compare total CAPX and OPEX including the vehicles themselves and then actually moving people from place to place trains crush everything else. A highway-mile might be cheaper to build than a rail-mile, but it requires maintenance and replacement far more often and the vehicles don't last any where near as long. Large amounts of total costs like vehicles and fuel are shifted to the traveller, reducing the options for many unless they meet a certain economic threshold.
Where train networks are extensive, frequent, and reliable the ridership numbers are huge, orders of magnitude beyond what a road network of equal right of way could hope to support.
I have no issue with people choosing a car. I have issues where a car is the only choice due to the built environment being actively hostile to all other forms of transportation. Walking --> Cycle --> Train depending on how far you want to travel is far more sustainable and opens options for far more people than car-centric infrastructure where only a car is functional.
Building out a train network also doesn't mean we shouldn't also have a quality road network as well; there are plenty of long tail needs where a vehicle that can go direct point-to-point is very valuable. We just need to be building more than just a road network as roads alone simply cannot handle the needs all travellers.
> And yet when people have a choice, they take their car.
That just false. Yes some people prefer cars, others don't. Overwhelming evidence shows that people most often prefer what the fastest thing is, and secondarily what the cheapest is.
I have plenty of money for a car, and I don't use one. So apparently I don't exist. Talking in absolutes makes you seem foolish.
The question you should be asking is, looking at society as a whole, whats and efficient and green way to meet the transportation needs of the population.
The reality in most cities less then 50% of population have cars, often much less. And that is after 50 years of pro-car policy. And literally every other possible benefit for cars.
What you should actually educate yourself on is that HUGE AMOUNT of pro car subsidies that actually exist in the real world. Of course if you make parking free, ram a highway right into the city center (burning existing communities down) and then make those people not even pay for the cost of that, then they will prefer the car.
If you design your roads in a why that makes it incredibly dangerous for anybody that is not in a car, guess what, more people take cars.
> And nobody ever asks why. They just stamp their feet and demand more trains.
There is actually lot of people that ask why. There is lots of research on this topic.
This research you clearly ignore because you have already made up your mind.
So maybe you should ask the 'why' question about your own position and study the history of it.
The reality is cites don't move, and population don't move very much either. And once you actually have fixed trains, population are even less likely to move. Many cities in Europe have literally been in the same place for 1000+ years.
Your augment might apply to mongolians in 1800s, but not to real existing western society.
Living in a country with amazing public transport, its just amazing what you can do. I was using public transport by myself when I was like 10, by 14 I was traveling all over the country and by 16 internationally without parents.
I can at any part of the day, randomly decide to go literally to any village above 100 people (and sometimes below), check and App that gives me a step by step guide how to get there. I have no fixed cost (if I don't want to) and then I can efficiently reach my destination while using almost no carbon. How is this not progressive? And btw, this can be done by anybody from 14 to late 70s. And this works right now, not in some amazing techno utopia future.
And I can use may laptop with high speed internet. I can easily go to a high quality bakery in between and get a high quality meal without losing any travel time either.
How non progressive it is to sit in a nice quite place with my laptop, eating a sand-witch driving threw beautiful country side.
A railway is simply the most efficient way to transport goods and people and if you have city and you have a lot of people, it will always be better then whatever 'individualized fancy AI pod' you imagine.
Notice how those companies working on all these individual pods eventually come back to 'platooning' and then 'docking'. Then they realize that operations on rubber wheels suck. Just slowly reinventing trains. The same techno future ideas existed in the 60s.
The fact is 2 cities exist, and will continue to exist. People will want to continue travel between them, that was true 100 years ago and its true today, and its still true in 100 years. Rail ways were the most environmentally friendly and efficient way to do that, both 100 years ago, and still today and it will still be true long into the future.
And its absolutely perfectly compatible with the most intelligent individual of transport, the bike. Getting on low impact, high threw-put trains to connect urban centers (urban doesn't mean big city) and then having individual transport in terms of bikes and e-bikes waiting for you is by far the most progressive and most innovative transport system you can design today. People on bikes will navigate more efficiency then whatever AI pods some California startup will come up with.
In Netherlands a staggering amount of people arrive at the train station by bike and they can easily pick up another bike when the arrive at their location. This is not only incredibly green, incredibly energy efficient, its also good for health and fitness (one of the biggest public health crisis) and road safety.
And the sad thing is, non of these are fancy high tech solution. These are literally all technologies that existed 50 years ago. But we should really way for some company to finally sell us some individualized EV pods that cost 40k$ per pod.
The Germans wanted 'Lebensraum' because they didn't want to import food and resources from others. They didn't want to relay on anybody else. They wanted the German race to dominate those resource areas. They wanted to compete in the great power game with US, Britain and the Soviets.
You act like they saw the apartment buildings in Berlin, decided that was 'to dense' and therefore they started WW2. That is simply not accurate.
Their aim was not to reduce density, but rather massively increase the population of the German race. Their policy was literally pro population growth. Their 'Lebensraum' was not for currently existing Germans, because German was to dense. The 'Lebensraum' was for future generations of German Supermen that they would literally breed.
I am serious by the way that this is an utterly disgusting way to argue. You should seriously be ashamed of yourself. I know that housing policy makes people insane, but you responding with 'Hitler genocide is because of urbanization' is the lowest level of argument I have come across.
Twist my words however you like if it makes you feel better, but we’re both describing the same thing.
Anyways, being confronted with contrarian ideas on the supremacy of European urbanism is clearly triggering for you (proving the point I made earlier). So much so that you feel the need to resort to ad-hominem personal attacks!
I won’t be responding anymore, but I recommend examining why you’re revisiting a thread days later to call a random stranger on the internet “utterly disgusting” for challenging your feelings on this topic.
What 'triggering' me is that you are using 'this causes genocide' in a complicity spurious way.
> for challenging your feelings on this topic.
Don't flatter yourself, you aren't 'challenging' anything. There are plenty of arguments you can make about Urbanism and I have heard plenty of of them. Reasonable people can differ and I'm fine with that.
> I recommend examining why
Because you are using the suffering, death and rape of millions to justify your position.
> days later
Yeah whole 'days'. I mean its like you wrote this in the 1960s.
Person spouts of nonsense about Hitler and then accuses other peopel of 'emotional trigger'. That's quite funny.
> Instead of linking to a youtube video from the r/fuckcars filter bubble, is there any succinct points to refute why a 3X greater population density would not naturally result in greater public transportation formation?
Do you really not understand how aggravation works?
Somehow the US can have very dense subways in New York, how is this possible, the US isn't dense. Its as if aggregate statistics aren't a good indicator when doing regional transportation planning for a region.
> The root cause of this is blue states often get Euro public transport envy
The root cause is that blue state Americans are still toxically individualist and anti-social and can’t undertake collective projects for shit. Europeans are at least somewhat orderly—in part because in several countries the disorderly anti-social people left for America: https://www.ft.com/content/dd212e0f-508a-3171-824c-d6076ae19....
If you’re built like a linebacker, you should give up your dreams of becoming a world-class ballet dancer. Likewise, blue states should give up the delusion that they can build large scale public projects like Europeans and Asians.
I wasn’t sure becuase it seems to me that if the description applies to Democrats and Republicans then just saying Americans would be a better phrasing (given that a large majority of Americans fall into one of these two camps). Singling out blue states is weird if it also applies to red states.
I’m singling out blue state Americans because their professed desires are inconsistent with their natures. Neither California nor Texas have effective public transit—or a populace that could build such a system. But only California is in denial about it.
Indeed, California isn’t very good at being a blue state. Its educational rankings are near the bottom. It doesn’t have universal healthcare. It doesn’t have good transit. Its cities aren’t safe and clean and homeless people aren’t taken care of. California—the beating heart of globalist financial capitalism, with some of the highest income inequality in the country—is much better at being a red state than even Texas.
Looks like I was right that this was an ideological snipe. The others appear to be wrong.
Your take, as usual, is badly wrong. You fail to take into account pertinent facts and draw the wrong conclusion. Here’s one pertinent fact: California subsidizes states like Mississippi. California is also hamstrung by the fact that isn’t its own country. There are limits to what it can do given these two facts.
> California is also hamstrung by the fact that isn’t its own country.
How? All the areas where California falls short—education, transportation, housing, healthcare, etc.—are ones left primarily to the states. For example, state and local governments provide 90% of educational funding, while the federal government provides only 10%. No federal law is stopping California from levying Sweden-like taxes to provide Sweden-like education, transportation, healthcare, and housing services.
It’s true that, under our system of progressive taxes, Californians pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes—because they make more money. They pay about 13% of all federal taxes, and get back about 83% of what they pay in federal services. That nets out to about $100 billion net transfer out. But that’s out of an economy of $3.9 trillion. That’s just 2.5% of California’s GDP. That money isn’t what’s standing between California and having high quality social services.
Also, to be clear, it’s not an ideological snipe. I’d like to live in a blue state with good public transit, universal healthcare, good public education, etc. But blue state Americans aren’t capable of building such a society, because above all they prioritize the individual and the self. I’m simply pointing out that at least red state Americans are honest with themselves.
> You’ve got the wrong color unless you think right leaning Americans are even worse than this description.
I think in many cases right leaning Americans are even worse in that regard. (E.g. tatted up Trump supporters and anti-vaxxers.) Orderly traditional conservatives are a minority on the right today.
You actually have to start somewhere. High Speed Rail is the backbone of the rail and public transport network for the next 100 years.
> yet they don’t understand Europe has 3X the population density
Aggregated statistic comparison are completely meaningless. They might serve in a low-quality online rant but not much more then that.
California has many cities over 500k people and some with many millions connect in a line. The idea that there isn't enough population density is total nonsense.
Switzerland has towns with 100 people in low density areas that have regular public transport. The idea that cities like LA and Bay Area are to small or not dense enough is insane.
> IMO fetishizing the European way of life is a bit silly, given density comes with its own problems
Again, you totally misusing density statistics and that invalids your whole argument completely.
> comes with its own problems (ie nobody having kids). In fact, there was this German guy in the 1930s who led the killing of millions of people partly to get more “living space”, so European density does have its downsides for…shall we say…stability.
What complete and other nonsense are you peddling now? Nothing said here makes any sense at all.
hing Hitler was a zero-sum thinker who didn't believe in density and that's why he thought conquering more land was a good idea.
Also invoking Hilter and Genocide in a argument about trains in California is such a insane thing do. It shows that you have no interest in real debate and rather spout inflammatory nonsense about Hitler.
> In fact, Europe has roughly the same amount of people today as it had in 1939.
At least try to look up basic statistics:
558,000,000 -> 746,225,356
And to somehow relate this to some argument about density doesn't make any sense anyway so its completely idiotic to bring it up in an argument about trains in California.
I'm sorry you feel it's inflammatory to question urbanization & public transport as panaceas.
First, aggregated statistics matter a lot, especially when examining the history of why humans have clustered in the US the way they have.
Second, nobody is saying public transport doesn't make sense inside the most dense US cities like LA, SF, etc (yes NYC exists). The issue is the network beyond those areas, due to suburbanization. The topic of this thread is building high speed rail to a suburban desert location.
Third, when discussing internet people's fetishization of European density over American suburban sprawl, its not crazy to bring up downsides -- of which there are many. It's true, the German desire for territorial expansion (and resulting World Wars and Genocides) were a direct result of perceived overpopulation. I dunno...I would call that a downside?
I know it's impossible to understand for an internet person in 2024, but childless urban living wasn't always cool and aspirational. Why do you think the automobile found such strong product-market-fit in the 1900s.
> At least try to look up basic statistics: 558,000,000 -> 746,225,356
If we want to argue of the semantics of "roughly the same," I'd say 35% growth qualifies when comparing a US population that grew 250% over the same time and a world that grew by 400%.
> I'm sorry you feel it's inflammatory to question urbanization & public transport as panaceas.
That's not what you did and its not what I objected to. But do play up the whole victim complex you have going on.
You are truly hitting all the 'alt-right' highlights. First make grand statements using totally misleading statistics then when this is pointed out to you react with 'Oh sorry I'm not allow to question things'.
There are actually good statistics that you could have used to make your point, but you didn't.
> Second, nobody is saying public transport doesn't make sense inside the most dense US cities like LA, SF, etc (yes NYC exists).
All of these huge places are by far big enough to have a robust local and regional public transit network. And then you connect those networks with an inter-regional connection, making both networks stronger by doing so.
That argument might not make sense to connect NYC with Denver. But it makes a hell of a lot of sense for LA and the Bay area. Specifically when both are trying to expand their public transit network and there are major cities in between where people would like to access both the Southern and the Northern regional transport networks.
> The issue is the network beyond those areas, due to suburbanization.
Aggregate density statistics would look the same no matter if urbanization or suburbanization.
> Third, when discussing internet people's fetishization of European density over American suburban sprawl, its not crazy to bring up downsides -- of which there are many.
And yet of those many non of the ones mentioned were correct or made sense or had statistical evidence backing them up. Maybe that why you got pushback.
Then you spun into some nonsense argument about Hitler.
> It's true, the German desire for territorial expansion (and resulting World Wars and Genocides) were a direct result of perceived overpopulation.
Assuming this was true, the term 'perceived' is meaningless. People can 'perceive' anything if they want to with enough ideology. The evidence would have clearly point out that they were wrong.
And people like you making argument in favor of those wrong positions against evidence are part of the problem with that perception.
> I dunno...I would call that a downside?
You are literally reducing WW2 to an argument about housing density. That completely ridiculous.
What matters to the Nazis was not relative density of urban areas but rather the TOTALITY of LAND and RESOURCE under state control. The wanted this to compete with continental scale powers like US and the Soviets.
So their conquests and ideology had LITERALLY nothing to do with urban housing density. They didn't see Berlin and think 'man people are so close together here, I guess we need to conquer Ukraine. That just total wrong, your argument is 100% wrong.
I suggest you read Adam Tooze work on Interwar and WW2 economics.
In terms of their architecture and city design they were french and Napoleonic inspired.
> I know it's impossible to understand for an internet person in 2024, but childless urban living wasn't always cool and aspirational. Why do you think the automobile found such strong product-market-fit in the 1900s.
The largest expansion in human population happened when humans started to live together more closely during the industrial revolution. And immigrants who usually have more kids most often move to cities as well.
The biggest fear of the 'over population' crazy people are mega cities like Delhi and Lagos.
Unless you have really amazingly solid statistics about humans living in density having much lower child rates when taking into account education, wealth and other factors. But you have not presented any such evidence. You have just asserted it to be true.
And even if it was true, to create urban sprawl just in the vague hope that people are gone have more kids is insane.
> If we want to argue of the semantics of "roughly the same,"
If you think '35%' qualifies as 'roughly the same' I question your sanity.
Need I remind you that you used pre-WW2 statistics and millions of people got displaced or killed? And millions of men died, leading to less kids? That had long term effects on population.
So if anything that 35% totally under-sells how many people would be in Europe how had WW2 not happened. So the argument that Europe grew less was related to housing density is nonsense.
WW1 had happened and reduced long term growth potential, then WW2 happened and made it worse. So of course for the next couple decades the US had a powerful economy and literally millions of Europeans went to the US and had kids there and many millions of Mexicans and Cubans (and many others) moved to the US. And non of that happened because of housing density.
I'd be curious to see the predicted traffic and usage. If the need is there, this train might become quite successful. People (and businesses) value the ability to do uninterrupted work while traveling.
Prediction: Project deadlines will have been shaved by salespeople and marketed as "high speed" when none of the requirements for it have been factored in the budget.
Brightline managed to deliver their Florida line pretty much on time and on budget.
The only real challenging part of the route is going to be pass out of the inland empire where the I-15 grade is a really steep. The rest of the project is pretty straightforward, with rights of way already in place and very few expensive and complex grade crossings. They picked this city pair and route very carefully to have an excellent chance to succeed both on construction simplicity and ridership. I'm not sure they will actually open in time for the 2028 Olympics, but I wouldn't bet against 2029 operations.
As for high speed, it won't be able to sustain true high speed rail velocity across the whole route (150mph / 250 kph), but it will be much faster than driving and there will be long stretches that are very high speed.
> Prediction: Project will take 10 years too long and results in a normal (non-high-speed) rail system connecting the two places that is too expensive for people to reasonably use.
Both takes are oblivious to the problem domain, to the point that you didn't even realize your worst-case scenario is completely irrelevant and doesn't even put any of the project's aspects into question.
Keep in mind that this is an infrastructure project. The expected outcome, such as the Interstate Highway System, is providing the US with infrastructure that is of critical importance to the local, state, and national strategic interests. Taking 10 years to build is not a problem because infrastructure projects often take decades to pull through. See Switzerland's Gotthard Base Tunnel and how it took billions to build and decades from signing off until being opened to the public.
Being non-high-speed is also perfectly ok. The difference between high-speed and non-high-speed in practice is the door-to-door travel time being close to 3h instead of around 1h30m. Once you start to think about it, you'll eventually realize airplanes take far longer than that to cover the same door-to-door trip as the flight itself takes less than a third of the time. In fact, it's widely established that commercial flights are only competitive with regards to high-speed trans for distances greater than ~600km, and trains remain competitive for half the distances if you have their commercial speeds.
More interesting, high-speed is just a brand. The important property is commercial speed, and you can have non-high-speed lines outperforming high-speed lines. A textbook case is Britain's high-speed rail network, whose top speed is ~160km/h, which is considerably slower than France's ~320km/h, but still ensures high commercial speeds as the track layout was designed to allow trains to constantly circulate at speeds close to the top speed.
Britain is max 200kph (125mph) currently although there is infrastructure designed for 225kph (140mph) on conventional lines though this is not permitted any more. It’s not correct to say that trains circulate at close to top speed a lot of the time as they share tracks with freight and commuter and there is a lot of congestion on uk lines. It’s not as bad as the US as commuter trains can also travel at 100mph and freight at 70-80mph. But it does prevent faster trains from travelling at 125mph for sustained periods. Also most routes were built in the mid 19th century and are not designed for sustained high speed running. If you look on openrailmap you’ll see there are occasional stretches of 125mph, longer stretches of 110mph but both are interspersed with 60-80mph here and there as the line threads its way round various hills that steam locomotives couldn’t cope with 175 years ago. So trains have to constantly decelerate and accelerate for curves and trains that stop more frequently. E.g the average speed of the fastest Glasgow to London train is about 90mph. British intercity trains are dogshit compared to France e.g the fastest Paris Bordeaux train at average 186mph is cheaper and more comfortable. Britain urgently needs more capacity and it might as well be high speed, but we’ve dropped the ball on that. Glasgow/Edinburgh-London should be 2-3 hours making it competitive with flying but it’s more like 4-5 hours, more expensive and as cramped as Ryanair but 6 times longer journey time.
> Britain is max 200kph (125mph) currently although there is infrastructure designed for 225kph (140mph) on conventional lines though this is not permitted any more. It’s not correct to say that trains circulate at close to top speed a lot of the time as they share tracks with freight and commuter and there is a lot of congestion on uk lines.
I was referring to Britain's adoption and pervasive use of its InterCity 125 trains.
The interesting aspect of the InterCity 125 was the fact that, instead of going with an optimized record breaking train, British Rail went the other way around and optimized their track layouts to allow an unimpressive train to achieve what was at the time unmatched commercial speeds.
No you’ve got it the wrong way round the Intercity 125 was an impressive feat of engineering designed very quickly as a temporary stopgap while lines were electrified and still holds the record for world’s fastest diesel train. It was a side project of the engineers that were designing the Advanced Passenger Train that was being developed at the time, which was supposed to be able to run at up to 150mph on conventional routes using tilting technology. The intercity 125 incorporated a lot of the lightweight construction research that was done for APT. Not much was done to the track to enable higher speed running, some resignalling and very very occasional route realignment for higher speeds. The intercity 125 achieved better times by being more lightweight and having faster acceleration than conventional locomotive hauled trains of the time, but it was only 15mph faster than the conventional trains. Most of Western Europe has standard lines with up to 125mph running, it is not uncommon. E.g a lot of the old non-tgv line between Paris and Bordeaux supports trains running at up to 200kph (125mph) Likewise 200kph running is common in Germany with conventional trains. The track in the UK was not special, quite the opposite as when the 125 was introduced we still had a lot of victorian style jointed rails that had been obsolete since the 1950’s. Britain was slow to upgrade to continuous welded rail, it wasn’t gone from all main lines until the 1990’s.
> could zoom travelers between Las Vegas and Los Angeles in just under two hours by the end of the decade
Just to be clear, this is to the "greater Los Angeles area", ending at Rancho Cucamonga station, a 48 minute drive (1h15m by public transit) to downtown LA, and a 1h15m drive (2h30m by public transit) to LAX.
Ok, but folks are perfectly willing to drive to Rancho Cucamonga if it means avoiding the 200-mile long traffic jam on I-15 on Sunday afternoon. A full transit system for everyone in LA would dwarf the cost of this rail line and it would take so long for people to return home they just would drive instead.
I think the parent commenter's point that it would have been much more useful to extend the main line itself into LA city centre rather than stop ~75 km away in the middle of nowhere. The good thing about railway stations is that they take up much less space than an airport—they're about the size of a large condominium complex—so cities could actually fit them inside, without having to do the whole airport thing and put the terminal tens of kilometres away.
And many cities even build office blocks and hotels on top of their railway stations. See London, Paris, Berlin, etc.
The problem is the space for the tracks running to the station, not the space for the station itself. Taking enough land by eminent domain to run tracks to downtown (or anywhere else dense) is prohibitively costly. And digging tunnels is even more expensive.
Rancho Cucamonga isn't near downtown LA, but it also isn't in the middle of nowhere. The whole stretch along I-210/I-10 from downtown LA to Rancho, and further past to San Bernardino, is contiguous suburbia (urban in some places). There are existing commuter rail lines between them too.
The size of the train station isn't the issue, it's the space taken by the tracks. This is when Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) are supposed to step in and save the day, but the cost of going underground is still too high to make it feasible.
In European terms, this is like moving King's Cross to Stevenage. Or moving Gare de Lyon to Paris Disneyland. The only difference is that both Stevenage and Paris Disneyland are already well-connected to rail: Stevenage is on the East Coast Main Line to Edinburgh and LNER stops there anyway, and Paris Disneyland is a TGV stop.
Why America is allergic to having a big central railway station in the middle of a city, I will never understand.
LA has a big central railway station in the middle of the city. Brightline isn't initially going to connect to it because reasons.
What reasons? They're building new right-of-way from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas; doing that from Rancho Cucamonga to downtown LA is much harder, because there's all this city in the way. Now, there's existing rail there, but it's heavily used, and negotiating access won't be cheap. (Building an additional track along it also won't be cheap.)
Nice clue. If this was being built in Europe it would probably have a number of stops within the city area including opposite outskirts, the center and the airport.
Totally honest question - have there been recent expansions of train lines into cities in Europe? In the last 20 years?
My default assumption right now is that this sort of grand construction is generally infeasible in countries outside of China where they generally don't care who they displace or the environmental damage, and often are building the cities from the ground up in the first place with the trains as a part of the urban planning.
I've been peripheral to a few urban light/heavy rail expansion projects in the US and the consistent issue is that even cities with a lot of urban sprawl are still dense enough that you have to displace a lot of people/businesses to build a new line and the stations around it. It's the sort of thing that's a lot easier to do when the city is young, or the train line got built in an era where you could just force people to sell their houses and move.
I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
I can't see a Wikipedia category for recent extensions.
It will very often make sense to connect the hundred year old station to a new major line, but as with Leipzig and Malmö they also build additional stations in the centre of the city.
The recipe is really simple: don't do megaprojects. Individual projects must be of appropriate size for the level of government that is making the decisions. When there are several projects of similar size in the pipeline all the time, the government can develop and maintain the expertise needed to build the infrastructure.
We absolutely know how to do megaprojects, but unless you _really_ have to, you don't want to do a megaproject. They've _always_ been a bit fraught; it's not like there was a golden age where they were easy and had a low failure rate.
Yea, I suppose I should have been more specific - it's also obviously easier to "upgrade" a line you already have the land and space for. It's not trivial, since you have to sacrifice some of the throughput in the meantime to support the construction, but it's easier than building an entirely new line.
Also, kinda tough reading that Stuttgart link where it seems like it was generally unpopular and the police did crimes to suppress dissent. I don't really know the details to have an opinion on if they're right, but still.
Grand Paris Express will be 200 km of new track to provide massive new connectivity to the Paris suburbs. Some extends existing lines, most is completely new lines adding connectivity between RER lines much further from central Paris to enable many trips to avoid the centre of the city. It's a combination of new tunnels and elevated guideway to be fully grade separated.
Closer to home I'd point to Montreal REM which will be 67 km of track in new elevated guideway when it's all done using automated trains. Phase 1 opened last summer. They did re-use an existing tunnel through downtown, but it needed extensive repairs and reconditioning as it hadn't been is use for nearly a century.
If you're interested in what systems around the world look like and what's been possible to build I'd highly recommend RMTransit. Canadian like me, so many videos are focused here, but he has tons of explainers on metro and train systems all over the world.
> Totally honest question - have there been recent expansions of train lines into cities in Europe? In the last 20 years?
Yes, absolutely. London's Crossrail opened a few years ago. Paris has been building new RER lines almost continuously.
> I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
Upgrading the existing station and existing lines, or building new lines along the same right-of-way, usually makes sense - the station is already in the right place and connects up to the existing network. E.g. Roma Tiburtina was basically completely flattened and rebuilt, but it's technically an "upgrade".
You're mostly right though, to build a new station in a city you absolutely do need a large block that you can reasonably demolish - e.g. in London the planned next high-speed rail station at "Old Oak Common" will be accommodated by demolishing a big prison (Wormwood Scrubs), and it's not exactly central. Or you build completely underground, but that's expensive and you still need to demolish stuff to make a worksite.
Frankly building a new station somewhere somewhat out of town is perfectly reasonable as a way of saving money, and generally a new business district will gradually spring up around the station - see e.g. Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, or Shin-Osaka. But you need good metro connections with the CBD, at least to start with, otherwise you end up like Haute-Picardie. IMO a lot of people who want high-speed rail in the US are putting the cart before the horse: you need to build a decent metro in a city before having high-speed rail to that city makes sense, and this kind of thing is exactly why - and one of the reasons this line works is exactly that it can go to a more "outlying" station because LA is one of the few cities in the US that has been building new metro lines over the last few decades.
Section 2 finished in 2007 (just within your 20 year cutoff!)
It links the channel tunnel with London St Pancras. Much of the London part is in tunnels and it is 100% grade separated.
The uk High Speed 2 route was also going to do this and build a new high speed rail line and station into London, but the exact issues you describe seem to mean that it will be halting at a point outside London instead possibly using existing tracks.
Overall though, High speed rail doesn't need new tracks into cities unless all the existing lines are full (or they are too slow)
It's much easier to build high speed line in the countryside and link it to the existing lines that run to existing stations in cities.
(Also the Elizabeth line in London, but's more like a metro really, even if it is 'heavy' rail)
That's good to hear! I suppose some of the sale for it is that the tunnel was already done, so the value was very clear. People were already taking that train on a slower version for business/tourism, so there was obvious value to be made expanding it.
Though, somewhat funny to me that it seems like it all got paid for by Canadian pensions?
You need an investor that's looking for something that will pay off over a long time period. Big pension funds are a natural fit. And the UK and Canada have a good relationship and a history of rail-related cooperation (e.g. a lot of UK trains are made by Bombardier).
Yes, it's happened. Even the UK, which has an arguably worse NIMBY problem than California, managed it (though it's getting close to your 20-year deadline):
As I understand it, east-west lines in the Baltic countries are being left in Russian gauge while new north-south lines will (of course!) be in standard gauge. Which is totally excellent until they finally get around (in some future century) to building the rail tunnel to Finland, whereupon they (i.e. Finland) will have to make some choices.
Depends where in Europe; high speed rail having a bunch of stops in a single city is a _little_ unusual, I think. However, the station would likely at least be linked into the local transport system in most countries.
There is planning to eventually connect into CA HSR at Palmdale via the High Desert Corridor project (a separate intercity high-speed rail project), and CA HSR and Brightline have, IIRC, discussed this as opening up single-seat travel (for the whole SF/LA/LV network.
> When it’s completed, the train will travel at 186 miles per hour
If China can push 286 mph in Shanghai, which means the tech exists, then why isn't this comparable? This is not snark; I am just curious what makes the Chinese train capable of such speeds, but the US train can't.
comparing China's high speed transportation is a low bar. they absolutely do not give a crap about derailment, in fact they straight up buried it, literally
instead you should see Japan's shinkansen as a measure of standards. They built that in the sixties
It's one the highest bars in the world, safer than Euro HSR. Wenzhou was the only large accident. Safety record after has been Shinkansen tier, except on largest network in the world. Crippled speed Brightline is already a deathtrap, US HSR would be fortunate to be a fraction as safe as PRC HSR.
Was just in Japan for the first time and Shinkansen is such a treat. Quiet, fast, clean, spacious. I'd sooo much rather train than take small 1-2 hour flights.
Yes the Shinkansen is such a civilised experience! I basically travelled direct to Tokyo from Nozawaonsen straight from the slopes and it was comfortable and not stressful in a way flying could never be.
Europe has a very similar rail setup. Both France and Germany have very good high speed rail connections with their TGV and ICE. You connect into those from London, Brussels and Amsterdam via Eurostar and the German ICE.
That has absolutely nothing to do with it: these projects are mostly through rural areas. The Tokaido shinkansen line is largely underground, in tunnels through mountains. The new Chuo shinkansen maglev line currently being built is 90% underground.
What's missing in America is national unity and political will.
Typical PRC HSR is 200-220 mph but routes are getting speed upgrades. Infra wise, expensive elevated tracks designed for trains to operate at high speeds unobstructed. Seperate from ground traffic so no worrying about hitting cars and most importantly people. Brightline has highest death rate due to suicides. Someone crunched math of Brightline death per unit of track relative to PRC, if PRC HSR network wasn't elevated theyd have 30000k deaths per year. IMO more important consideration.
I’m not fussed with top speeds. Average travel speed that takes into account waiting for the next departure is a more practical measure. A high speed train that stops in every town has a lower effective speed than the top speed suggests. A high speed train with hourly departures instead of every 30 or 15 min means you wait more.
And of course high speed means higher cost. The average person is very price sensitive on transportation costs.
>Average speed: 224 km/h (139 mph) (duration: 8 minutes and 10 seconds)
The bigger issue is likely:
>According to Chinese media's report, however, due to the huge costs of operating and the lack of the passenger flow, Shanghai Maglev Transportation Company would lose 500 million to 700 million RMB every year
It is pretty impressive and they're looking at building an extension. however oddly its operation speed has been significantly reduced from 268mph to 186mph.
The basic problem is that Maglev is on average more expensive to build and operate
and cannot (unlike ordinary high speed rail trains) ever operate on ordinary (non high speed) rail track.
It's also still pretty experimental, the Shanghai one is operational and high speed, all other operational systems are either low speed or experimental test beds.
That's all of 30km of maglev track. It opened over 20 years ago, and there doesn't seem to be much interest in doing any more. By contrast, there's about _60,000km_ of 'normal' (~300km/h max) high-speed rail. It would really be pretty _weird_ for the US to try beyond-cutting-edge for its first attempt at a real high-speed rail system, and would probably end badly.
Citynerd did a really good evaluation of the LA-LV Brightline total travel time with connections in the LA basin 4 months ago. His evaluation is that in some parts of LA it's roughly competitive with air travel (he actually looks at automobile/transit connections from Cheesecake factories?! to Caesar's Palace) and it beats car travel time in most parts of LA, but not by a lot.
The problem is getting to the Brightline station since it's so far out from the middle of LA.
I can't wait for the return of private train cars. Imagine the casinos hitching up private cars to the Brightline, thereby improving their experience while subsidising everyone else.
That's highly unlikely. High speed rail doesn't work like old school rail used to - you have full electric trainsets where all the cars are tightly coupled together (often even sharing bogies) so coupling/decoupling is only possible in a maintenance yard. Also, depending on the model, often all or at least many of the cars are also powered and provide distributed traction.
Having branded luxury cars would be he fairly easy and could easily be a hit; private cars are unlikely to be feasible with your regular high speed electric multiple units.
most EMUs have standard couplers at the end of the trainset, the problem is more so that the rail-wheel and bogie suspension dynamics of high speed cars are highly engineered and derailments at 300km/h are catastrophic
Private train cars never went away, as far as I'm aware. Amtrak has (always?) allowed folks to couple private cars to the end of their trains (for an eye-watering price, of course).
My understanding is that while they generally have, and there may be some form of legal requirement that they provide service to private cars, in the last six years or so Amtrak has been increasingly restrictive, with some suggesting that they are trying to make private cars practically infeasible to use. There seems to have been a battle between Amtrak and private car owners that started in 2018 [1], and it's unclear if there has been any resolution to that.
A private train car to vegas would be amazing actually. Especially if on the inside they went with an old-fashioned interior design with lots of oak paneling.
Which is to say they're being smart about it. LA is huge and sprawling, there's no guarantee that where you wanted to go was downtown. Build your HSR station somewhere on the metro network (and if it works out then just having the HSR station there will ultimately make it grow into a place worth going), let that take care of the rest.
CAHSR phase 1 is merced to bakersfield and the current design for SF-LA throws in the towel on the last mile. if you think what they're doing now is silly, just wait until the laypeople get their hands on the altamont/pacheco palmdale/tehachapi discourse.
Awesome! Now I can drive an hour+ to Rancho Cucamonga, park, wait for the train, pay the equivalent of four plane tickets for my family, then take a 2 hour+ train ride, instead of driving for 4 hours from my house for the cost of half a tank of gas ($35). So cool!
I just looked up air fare. Seems like you can get a $27 ticket from la to las vegas. Takes about an hour and a half. That's always the real competitor with trains, even in europe where trains supposedly rule.
In practise the flight is much slower due to security etc, and having to get to and from the airport.
For example, I wouldn't consider taking a flight from Copenhagen to Århus (40 minutes vs 2¼ hrs) as the saving is wasted on waiting, and flying is much less comfortable.
(That's an extreme example for the distance, as it crosses a sea.)
It's certainly a competitor, but definitely not the preferred option.
In practise the flight is much slower due to security etc
Only for very specific routes. If I want go to from here to the one of the maybe 4 closest large cities, I'm definitely taking the train. If I want to to go from here to just about any other major city in Europe flying is almost always much faster. A bunch of people from work where going to a conference in Amsterdam a few years ago and some of them wanted to take the train for environmental reasons, and the train was literally 20+ hours door to door from the midsized European city I live in. Directly flights are under 2 hours.
Trains don't rule Europe on cost, airline prices are usually lower if you're willing to fly Ryanair or similar.
But the train is much faster if you want to go from city center to city center for a distance that's a relatively short flight. Like London to Paris or Amsterdam to Frankfurt. If you want to go across Europe from one side to the other, the plane is much faster.
There are a lot of indirect subsidies going into air travel. To me this has always seemed rather perverse, and the money should have been invested in proper rail infrastructure instead, from a climate standpoint as well as for convenience (a proper rail network deposits you in the middle of a city without the need for a car, you don't have endless security controls etc.).
That's not really a subsidy for air travel, in fact it's a cost. People here are talking about how they would prefer rail so that they don't need to go through security at the airport. That's bad for airlines.
Amtrak from NYC to DC fluctuates in pricing but can be $35 each way, if booked booked far enough in advance. That’s about the same distance from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas. So I think it’s a similar ballpark to a plane ticket.
The real way to do this should be like Japan shinkansen, no floating pricing where you have to do some speculative game.
Flat pricing + make ticket good for something like 2 weeks to ride whenever.
If there was such predictability and flexibility, they'd immediately significantly increase their ridership.
There's a dead reply below that says "shinkansen are cheaper when bought in advance" --- I was led to believe otherwise, good to know as I ride it a few times a year.
Commercial rail operations will try to maximise revenue, doing airline style pricing. Very visible in the UK where last minute or peak time train tickets are crazy expensive. (All their train lines are commercial)
Compared to trains being run as a semi government provided utility, like the Netherlands, where pricing is flat based only on route. Makes the train a more relevant alternative, which helps with road congestion. But tax money is used to build railways and stations, the tickets only pay for operating the train itself.
Yeah, if you already have a car-based life then cars will win out. The point of projects like this is to expand the number of people who don't need a car, and that's probably going to be single people or no-kids couples to start with. The good news is that getting those people out of cars will free up road space, so even if the train doesn't work for you personally you still benefit.
Honestly LA to LV is probably not bad it’s the right distance, it’s mostly desert so most of the HS2 issues will be avoided. If it’s actually high speed eg 200mph+ then I could see it working.
Edit: oh it’s 100mph, and it stops 37 miles outside of LA. Should rename it HS3
2hrs 10min +50-75 minutes to east of LA is a distance but 4-5+ hours highly variable by driving is an interesting choice since you have a car at your destination.
There is also going to be two intermediate stops in California at “Hesperia and one in Apple Valley.” (1)
So, 3.5 hours or so for guessing $100 one way versus 4-5+ hours at $40 gas 30mpg 220miles by car vs 1hr 8 minutes gate to gate $21-$60 by air without including security for any options.
They mentioned a metro link stop for LA but nothing about a plan for quite a ways off the strip in Las Vegas. Maybe a shuttle stop on the airport - car rental return loop. It’s going to be opposite the Las Vegas South Premium Outlets at Warmsprings rd and Las Vegas Blvd.
I compare to Brightline’s other rail project from Miami to Orlando. Tickets $80-$300 for similar mileage. Their high speed rail ended up with 70mph to a record 130mph.
> The federal government is increasingly embracing private business collaboration in its space missions, space-based projects and to power the new US Space Force as it ramps up in Los Angeles. This is creating a lot of activity and opportunity for LA-based aerospace companies.
> Jacobsen, a contributing editor and investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, interviewed the former Area 51 employees in 2008 and 2009, shortly after the CIA declassified much of the work they had done.. Jacobsen reveals some of the wild research that went on in the 1970s at Area 51 -- where the military built the U-2 spy plane
High speed rail can shorten commute between Los Angeles privately-funded aerospace and Las Vegas publicly-funded aerospace ecosystems, supporting commercialization that can benefit CA, NV and USA.
It will cost more than the famously cost overrunned James Web Space Telescope, that was built over a period of 24 years, the largest and most advanced space telescope ever built, launched into the sun/earth L2 point a million miles from earth, to build a rail line between LA and Las Vegas?
Rancho Cucamonga is not Los Angeles. Victorville is not Los Angeles. How the hell are you supposed to get to Rancho Cucamonga without a car? For Las Vegas people going to LA, what the hell are you supposed to do when the train dumps you in the middle of Rancho Cucamonga?
If you want real ridership, public transit in both LA and LV needs to be functional.
Connect it to Union Station and LAX if you want some ridership. On the Las Vegas end make it stop smack in the middle of the strip.
Otherwise this thing is useless.
Also 125mph is not high speed rail. LA-LV in 2 hours + time spent getting to the train station + buffer time to avoid missing the train + long slow car rental line on the other end while 15 people ahead of you each have a chit chat with the one employee dealing with the rentals would be more time than just driving end to end. These people just don't get it.
Try LA-LV in 1 hour and maybe we're talking. But really, fix public transit in both cities first.
They've started on the parts they could get land rights quickly, non-contentiously. The other bit, the (sub)urban runs each end will demand much more capex, and probably horrendous NIMBY pushback. Once this is done, the rest will follow.
The speed claims are good: going in saying it will be shinkansen fast, 350kph would be suicidal when it can't do it. Going to market on 125MPH means when they exceed it (and they will) it will be better for them.
I think they have made savvy financial choices. I get your pushback, it will suck living the commute delays either side. You think it kills it. I think it's a forcing function.
Thing is, I'm really a big public transit fan. I see time and time again that the US just doesn't get how to build a public transit system that the middle class wants to use, and would prefer to use when they already have a car.
In countries where it works, it's a non-issue to get to/from the train station on both sides, and the train stations have ample good food options (real food; not a Dunkin Donuts), clean restrooms, direct connections to subways without having to even exit the building. It's an all-around pleasant experience.
I suppose, if they can go to market on 125mph, fine, but I'm rather pessimistic that anyone who lives in LV or LA (especially) would use it considering the sad state of public transit in both cities.
To be honest, faster rail between Boston - NYC - Washington (on the order of 1.5 hours between Boston-NYC and 1.5 hours between NYC-Washington, which is doable at Shinkansen/CRH speeds) would be a better market in my opinion until the west coast can get their shit together with public transit (if ever). There's plenty of business need on the east coast for faster trains, the space for the rails is already carved out by Amtrak's stupidly-slow Acela Express, and all 3 cities have excellent public transit, good enough that a significant chunk of the population of all 3 actually lives car-free.
Tons, I mean TONS of people drinking alcohol and or consuming THC will want to use that service. There will be piss all over the train if they don't put in a bathroom. which they wont because they never do...
Yeah the bathroom thing is another thing I don't get. Why is the US so stingy with public bathrooms? I don't even drink alcohol and I've actually had to pee on the road multiple times because I couldn't find a bathroom, and the only bathrooms within walking distance were "customers only" (at least for men; women usually get to use them in anecdotal experience).
In Europe and Asia I've never had a situation in an urban area where there wasn't an easily accessible public bathroom within a couple blocks.
People in SF complain about piss on the ground. Yet I've had to piss on the ground waiting 45 minutes for the Caltrain because the goddamn Caltrain bathrooms were closed for the rest of the night and the Panera next door wouldn't let me use theirs. What do you expect?
In Europe and Asia, there's always a toilet (usually one per carriage) on a middle or longer distance train. It's only urban trains and metros that don't have them — on these, the expectation is that you use a toilet in the station, and the train is so frequent it doesn't matter if you miss one.
The Brightline website says their trains in Florida have toilets, I don't see why California would be any different.
i’m currently in paris where the only “public” WC in the train stations still require payment and none of the stops between terminals on the RER seem to have had public restrooms on the platforms. it feels quite similar to my home city in the US.
i find there to be quite a few things to love about Europe over the US, but the idea of toileting as superior in Europe than in the US strikes me as odd. colloquially, i chalk it up to travel/cultural anxiety and stress because i can find a place/way to toilet in SF, NYC, or Orlando far more easily than in Paris, Florence, or Frankfurt
Come to Japan if you want to see truly superior public toileting. Not only are public toilets numerous and easily accessible (even in parks), they're free, clean, and usually have washlets installed.
Don't they realize that human bodies need to excrete waste and if you don't give them a designated place to do it, it's going to come out on the street? And then the same people who refuse restroom access complain about shit and pee on the street?
Someone has to clean them too and you clearly don’t realize how trashy people ruin things. And for some reason we seem to tolerate those breaking social contracts and homeless drug users messing things up instead of dealing with it.
It sucks but it’s not a young minimum wage worker’s primary job.
As someone living in Germany, I have no idea what you're talking about. Paid public toilets are the norm overwhelmingly here, and even then the offer is minimal. The famous Berlin new main station, while gorgeous and modern, has 1 (one) facility, with 5 or 6 stalls per gender. Many train stations have nothing.
I found plenty of free toilets in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and plenty of pay toilets in Stockholm and Oslo. In Germany I usually looked for supermarkets, train stations, fast food restaurants, but come to think of it, Germany was harder.
It's approximately a 4 hour drive by car. The train might be able to do it in 2 hours, but of course there's the overhead you mention.
The drive costs around $40 in gas one-way. If this train is indeed $80 per ticket one-way, then I fail to see how it will be competitive with driving. A group of 5 going to Vegas would pay 10X the cost of driving and lose a lot of flexibility.
> A group of 5 going to Vegas would pay 10X the cost of driving and lose a lot of flexibility
But they'd gain back the time they would have spent driving. Pretty much everyone I know in Los Angeles flies to Las Vegas, though it's an admittedly biased sample.
> Pretty much everyone I know in Los Angeles flies to Las Vegas
Huh what? Almost everyone I know in LA drives to Las Vegas just to avoid having to deal with airports. And when you arrive in Las Vegas you already have your favorite car filled with your favorite snacks.
And so the train will avoid the hassle and comfort issues of airport/airlines and you’re not screwed paying for parking (which you left out of your example for some reason).
We peaked with the west coast and east coast mainlines. HS1 was suffered in its ambitions thanks to low cost airlines (the infrastructure is underutilised today). HS2 got gutted. The Transpennine electrification is going at a snail's pace and isn't ambitious in the slightest.
The UK is finished with ambitious infrastructure (and house building), as we are a populous country of rich and influential NIMBYs with a party often in power that panders to them
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that some American steam locomotives went >120 mph in passenger service (the Milwaukee Road's F7's and the Pennsylvania Railroad's S1's, for example). I believe if you look at the PRR timetables, they had some routes that averaged 80 mph between stops, meaning they almost certainly hit a max speed at least over 100 mph. The US didn't have the same speed record contests that the Brits did though, so there's no official record.
In 1947 a law was passed requiring trains above 79mph to have some kind of automatic train stop system, so that ended most of the high speed steam service.
The UK's record-setting locomotives were pre-war. The HSTs were only a moderate increment over the existing "deltics", but it gets much harder to add that extra bit of speed for true high-speed rail (and there's no real evidence that US steam trains ever achieved 125mph, even though 100mph+ running was routine on some routes).
For those interested, this is a good video that summarizes the US's high speed steam locomotives, from a YouTuber who works on steam locomotives (despite the title, it's fact oriented and there's not too much flag waving). There is some evidence, but it's not conclusive.
Great Western Railway locomotives had automatic stop long before the end of steam. Why would having to have that automated put an end to high speed steam service?
In the US, it was only required in 1952 (due to the aforementioned law passed in 1947), and there was very little experience with it before then. By 1947, it was clear that diesel was going to replace steam due to steam's significantly higher maintenance costs (and the lack of MU). If you're running a mainline railroad in 1947, you already know that you're gonna be replacing almost all your steam locomotives within the next 10 years, so why bother upgrading them?
>Connect it to Union Station and LAX if you want some ridership.
FTA:
>Brightline West [...] aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track almost all in the median of Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California. It would link there with a commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles
I hope they can run a more frequent service, or at least alter the times to match up with the HSR, once service begins. It's currently only hourly after the morning, and doesn't run after 7pm.
> It would link there with a commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles
So cut the commuter rail crap and just send the bullet trains to downtown Los Angeles?
Put another way, they've cut 4 hours of driving into 3 hours of train riding where you can't even get 3 hours of sleep and have to haul your luggage to another platform, likely up and down some stairs, 2 hours into it. And you still need to deal with transit once you arrive, so add another hour to get wherever you're actually going in LA (if you're lucky with the traffic). Time savings is zero.
Yup, just like flying between SF and LA. It takes the same amount of time as driving once you factor in all the other BS that airports entail. Charter planes are definitely faster but an order of magnitude more expensive. JSX is a decent alternative if you live near OAK and want to go to BUR. JSX out of SJC would be awesome, but not as awesome as a $50 high-speed train ride to LA that took the same time door-to-door as JSX.
> If you want real ridership, public transit in both LA and LV needs to be functional
Perfect is the enemy of the good. Even if everyone who takes the train drives from Los Angeles to Rancho Cucamonga (or takes an Uber), they're still offsetting less-efficient transportation modes.
My understanding is that it will share with the Metrolink station already in Cucamonga.
Also there are already plan for a major bus hub for the regional area in Cucamonga as well.
The magic that makes this work is that the right of way is down the middle of the existing I15 freeway. No real impact studies are likely necessary for that route, and once they hit Barstow, it’s quite flat.
Friday commute traffic out of LA and OC to the area at the bottom of the pass is absolutely impacted by the crush of traffic heading over the Cajun pass into the high desert. Not all of it is Vegas bound, but much of it is.
I am curious how they will get through the pass. I’m assuming they’ll lease ROW from either UP or BNSF, as they own the two sets of tracks currently over the pass.
> long slow car rental line on the other end while 15 people ahead of you each have a chit chat with the one employee dealing with the rentals
it will be a fast line of ubers and yellow taxis
but okay 2005 called.
jokes aside, Brightline has delivered before. It has potential for grift but I think they’ll pull this one off. They already plan to use metrolink from downtown LA Union Station. not perfect but decent coordination.
Might be a better idea to address the water scarcity issue than blow $12B in cash on sending more people there from a major metro area. When Lake Mead is gone, what will Vegas do? I’m guessing it’s all about waiting until it’s critical and imminent and then a very costly, taxpayer funded solution will have to be slammed in place.
Maybe it’s time to get serious about desalinization plants and get a pipeline to desert communities? They’ll sure as hell build an oil pipeline, so water should be an easy choice, right?
There is a 50 mile stretch of the Acela that reaches over 150MPH that qualifies as "high speed" rail, so technically this is the second high-speed rail in the US.
Third or more, because there's a small stretch of Brightline that qualifies (just the part from Orlando to the coast). I assume that's why Buttigieg said "first operating high-speed rail line", a nuance that seems to have been lost in the headline.
> Brightline's maximum operating speed is 125 mph (200 km/h)
This is a definitional thing; for whatever reason US regulators define this as 'high-speed', but no-where which operates actually high-speed (ie pushing 300km/h) lines does. The LA-Las Vegas project, and the California high speed rail project, are high-speed by international standards, at least in parts.
> This is a definitional thing; for whatever reason US regulators define this as 'high-speed', but no-where which operates actually high-speed (ie pushing 300km/h) lines does.
To be truly pedantic: there is no single international standard[1] of "high speed" rail, but in general, new lines up to 155mph, or upgraded lines up to 125mph, are usually considered "high speed".
In the United States, "higher-speed" rail has been the term used for trains up to 125mph.[2]
France is planning a new 410 km high speed rail line between Paris and Lyon for €12 billion [1]. That's $11.2 billion at current exchange rates, giving $25 million per km. That seems to be a pretty normal price for high speed rail in Europe [2] for routes that don't need tunneling.
So this US project is about 36% more expensive than a typical EU high speed rail project. Higher, but is it really enough higher to qualify for "what's wrong in the US"?
It's also, according to the article, the "first true high-speed rail" in the U.S., so presumably there are fewer existing efficiencies to make use of. And, since it's a California project rather than a Federal project, I think that whatever happens would mostly reflect on California, rather than being proof of anything about the entire country one way or the other.
Yes because you assume the final cost will be 12 billion and not 20 billion.
Another real possibility is the project starts and gets engineering plans developed certified and on the shelf and 2 billion is spent getting things going… only to run into a snag and never get completed.
(Google the high speed rail line from Iowa City to Chicago .. that was also fully funded .. and still 10 years later not a single mile of rail has been laid)
It takes just over 3 days to travel from the Bay Area to NYC. The price is $281 [1].
Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free. You need to consider how much money a few days of hotel and restaurants would cost, so the comparison is complex. Also the room cost is not really per-person unless you are traveling alone.
> It takes just over 3 days to travel from the Bay Area to NYC. The price is $281 [1].
How many days does it take to fly from SF to NYC?
> Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free.
First class? I've done the trip in a room and there's nothing first class about it. The bedding was suspect. Everything in the room felt old and dirty. In the dining car, you don't even get your own table. They cram you with other passengers. And for much of the trip, your view consists of corn fields and miles long CSX trains slowly chugging alongside your train. And to add insult to injury they was hours late ( 9 hours if memory serves ) so if you have friends or family waiting to pick you up, make sure to tell them to set aside the whole day. If you are a light sleeper, then you are not going to have a good time because the train wheels on the tracks are very loud. If you have cash to burn, then try it out for the experience. But it's not a trip I'd recommend or take again.
My comment was in response to someone who was an order of magnitude off on price and time. Wasn't really meant as a review of the experience.
Regarding your bad experience on the train... it seems to me that a lot of quality went downhill during the pandemic, and I'm wondering if you went before or after the pandemic started.
On your comments about lateness and how hard it is for light sleepers. Your comments there are very true, and people who would be concerned with either of those should think twice before riding.
I love riding long-distance trains. But I don't kid myself: it is way longer and more expensive than flying. There is a reputation on Amtrak for severe lateness. And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse. People should definitely read negative reviews and look for common issues; if the common problems would be a problem for them, that should be a deal-breaker.
> My comment was in response to someone who was an order of magnitude off on price and time.
I agreed with you there. That commenter exaggerated the costs. My response was directed to the 'first class' portion of your comment.
> And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse.
My trip was many years ago. Before the pandemic. I personally don't think the 'first class' amtrak experience is worth the money unless amtrak upgrades everything about the experience.
Is there any country or international line on the entire planet that attempts to have a serious discussion about the merits of a 6-12 hour+ train ride versus flying? High speed trains reduce the need for any other form of transportation where someone could reasonably waste a full day in the car. Nobody is trying to justify a train trip over one of the widest countries in the world.
It wouldn’t take that much more effort to extend the terminus a little further east down the 210 right of way to the 605 and then south into Orange County. And then, finally, we can fulfill the dream of a train to Anaheim, Azusa and CUC-amonga.
what does it mean "new track almost all in the median of Interstate 15"? Do they plan to run a train in the middle of highway? Is there is enough width there for a train?
Does a drunk driver tearing across the median mean 20 hour delays while they clear the wreckage? Or are they going to barricade both sides of the tracks the entire way?
Hard to see this as anything other than big-time grift.
This is estimated to be a $12B project. $6.5B raised so far: $3B grant and $3.5B in tax-exempt, "private activity" bonds. Does anyone actually think the rest will come from investors? Of course not, the government will see a half-finished project that it supported and provide the funding to finish the job, including the inevitable overruns.
A private company receiving 6.5B (and likely, eventually $12+) of government money... no pressure or expectations to make any profit. Great deal if you can get it!
I've done plenty of research. The Florida operation is backed by Fortress Investment Group. It is not involved in funding the California-Nevada project. As I've already pointed out, all the money raised so far comes from government sources.
$6.5B to demonstrate it is in fact possible to build HSR on budget and on time in the states and that CAHSR is just run by a consultant mafioso in a trenchcoat sounds like a great deal!
It lost $192 million in the first 9 months of 2023. $201 million same period of 2022. It also lowered its passenger forecast to Orlando from 7 to 5.5 million.
That's why I believe public infrastructure should be publicly-owned. It's rare to find a profitable metro system...it should be run by the government as a benefit for citizens, not as a business like Brightline.
The rail infrastructure is publicly owned. But the rail infrastructure is open access that private companies can pay for. As far as I understand you can even have a public carrier but it must bid for access like its private counterparts do.
This has already led to an explosion of high quality high speed rail service in countries like Italy and Spain.
To rephrase, some things are not directly profitable but tend to have outsized profitable effects. E.g., the education budget doesn't directly generate profits, but educated people go on to get good jobs and pay a lot of taxes, refunding the cost of their education by many multiples.
The same goes for roads, highways, and rail. Not directly profitable, but they enable a lot of free movement that boosts the economy and, in turn, taxes.
The regulations of rail in the US are slightly perverted (freight rail interests dominate the discussion, usually). The economics of passenger rail in the western US are also difficult when large densities of people are so spread out and the only "primary" reasons for going from A to B are for recreation, not work/industry.
Having experienced the post-privatization decline of public services a few times I'm of the opinion that public transport, being a societal good, should be publicly funded, publicly owned and funded well. Rail is especially expensive to maintain and profit from. Private companies tend to reduce maintenance to a bare minimum or less in the name of efficiency, resulting in the infrastructure declining whilst profits rise. Then the government steps back in to fund repairs to a critical service, indirectly funding the profits. That's definitely a typical capitalist grift for "too big to fail" companies. For those that don't like public money spent on infrastructure its a not a binary choice of to spend the money or not, it's inevitably when to spend it and how.
In the UK there was for a while the private finance initiative, where the government contracted private companies to provide services or development. The result, as concluded by the very private business friendly right wing government, was that is was a total waste of money, with no measurable benefit but costing billions extra than if the government had provided services directly.
This. The $12B represents about 0.2% of the total US outlays for FY 2023. People tend to see the big number without considering the rest of public spending. You have to crack an egg to make an omelette. As a result the general population will tend to vote against these kinds of investments and then look back in 50-100 years and wonder why other countries seem to have all of the nice public infrastructure.
Good stuff! I hope Americans start again to invest on cutting edge projects. In the last 30 or so years, all the really big projects happened in the Middle East and East Asia. You visit China, Singapore or Dubai and if feels like you step into the future.
I wish it was public instead of private. Brightline in Miami was obviously a line rich people take around the area for select events. I'm glad the Musk's line from O'Hare to the Loop failed when it was obvious that CTA just needed an express lane on the Blue line
> Brightline in Miami was obviously a line rich people take around the area for select events.
Aeroplanes used to be something just for rich people too. Heck, go back far enough and so were cars, or even bicycles. You've gotta build a bunch before it becomes something mass-population.
As an outside/non-American observer: yeah, it'd make total sense, but it seems like there's no political will in the US to build publicly-owned transport infrastructure beyond:
- Maintaining what's already there
- Select state-level projects, in some states
- Select municipal-level projects, in some cities
This means there's been a huge deficit in this kind of project at the federal level.
In saying that, I don't want to give the impression that I'm on some ivory tower. Via Rail, a crown corp, is our national rail operator, and it's riddled with issues with little in the way of meaningful solutions.
"no political will in the US to build publicly-owned transport"
There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work. It's hard for me to imagine the federal government succeeding at that for any reasonable cost, and I suppose you could blame some of that on partisan bickering. But I also can't imagine California succeeding for any reasonable cost, and it's a one-party state, so there's no excuse.
At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep. My guess is that Birghtline found a few such people and that's their competitive advantage as a business.
> There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work.
This ends up being self-fulfilling. People don't trust the government, so they suffocate the project in fixed payscales and low-bid rules and endless reviews, and so the government can't get anything done, and so people don't trust the government...
> At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep.
Right - so you need to be able to hire those people and pay them something close to what they're worth, or build up that expertise over the long term by having a steady pipeline of projects and training people as you go. But voters don't trust these governments enough to empower them to do that.
Perhaps. But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it, and then you have a huge sunk cost that you don't want to cancel so it drags on forever, eroding trust even further.
Private companies have some advantages here. If they don't think the project will succeed, they will stop, because they know there's no payday. If it's due to bad laws, they will lobby (a bad word, I know) to change them. They'll fire people who don't perform. They'll look in all kinds of creative ways to find people who can get the job done. They'll stop and think about who might actually ride it, because they need the ticket revenue, so they will build the lines in the right places with the right stops.
Maybe all of that could be true for some governments. But there's a long way to go before the US or the California government is able to do any of those things.
> But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it
Maybe. Maybe there's no alternative to doing a pipeline of progressively bigger projects with in-house management and accepting that the first few will suck. But if you're not willing to pay what the expertise costs then there's no way you'll make it work, you need to get that level of expertise in house. I'd think that if you're willing to pay top dollar then you have at least a chance of hiring the right people.
It's kinda the same problem we have in the EU though. High speed rail is mostly state level. France wants their TGV serving mostly French travellers. Same with the Spanish AVE and German ICE.
It would be amazing to book a high speed train from Amsterdam to Barcelona at prices competing with Aviation. But nobody cares about this at a pan-EU level.
Isn't some of this due to different use cases? The need for the German government to have a train from Berlin to Bremen makes sense in a way that probably doesn't matter if you're not living in Germany, but having a train that connects on the various borders in a compatible way is harder to fund and requires all the other countries to generally agree to do it at the same time.
The likely outcome of a whole-EU train system is something like the US system where Amtrak generally hits the major population centers, but leaves a ton of the US behind because when you talk about Federal priorities, a train from Denver to Dallas isn't a huge priority compared to LA to SF or Boston to NYC. Obviously the EU system would fare better because it's starting from a better base, but it's emblematic of the tradeoff between bottom-up and top-down planning and investment for something like this.
The problem in EU is that most of the funding comes from the states so they want their own taxpayers to benefit first.
So there's not really any interest in selling tickets from Country A to Country C. Because country B has to put up with the traffic which is already resource-restricted. And they prefer their internal customers to get priority.
This way it will never end up as a reasonable alternative for flying. What's really missing in the EU is the ability to bypass cities. A train from Amsterdam to Barcelona has to cross right through the center of Antwerp, Brussels, Lyon (or a transfer in Paris through a horrible metro connection). It's not possible to have a direct train that bypasses all the cities straight to its destination. That would be a real alternative to flying. Considering the amount of flights between Amsterdam and Barcelona daily it's easily possible to fill a few direct trains. It's that stopping in every city center (without in-city facilities for high-speed tracks) that make it so horrible.
But anyway the EU really doesn't care about this at all and considering the huge construction durations they're too late for this to make a difference in climate change anyway.
Its not just the smell--its harassment, ranting, screaming, and even violence. Women especially don't feel safe. These are people with serious mental illness.
It’s like 2-3 hr drive between the two cities, and at both end you have to navigate auto transport, most likely a rental though maybe Uber would work out but at greater cost for anything beyond a single destination. I would imagine most people would just opt to drive, since they need a car at either end of that line?
LA to SFO would be worthwhile but probably much harder.
Between Sacramento and Merced, and LA and Bakersfield, there will be a "high speed rail bus service". For other parts there will be regional commuter train and bus services.
Then, eventually, it'll become: https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Business_Plan_...
Also, for the Las Vegas link, the terminus is on the Metrolink line so you can take a commuter train from Union Station. People taking Amtrak from points east could get off at the Ontario station and it’s a relatively short taxi/bus ride to the RC terminal (Amtrak uses a different set of tracks coming into L.A. from the east than the Metrolink station serving RC). I suppose it would be feasible to extend the line a little further south to connect with Amtrak should there be demand (if they went to the Ontario station, then the Ontario airport could also be integrated into the service).
Then again, at about $45 million per mile, it's actually not even that much more expensive that Chinese HSR: to build the current 45000km of rail at the LV-LA price would be $1.25 trillion, which isn't vastly more than the Chinese system has cost so far. In fact it's very roughly about as much as the US spends, per year, on healthcare on top of what European countries pay for the same outcomes (total annual spending: 4.2 trillion and a bit, or 12.5k per person, vs global number two, Switzerland, at 8k: about 1/3, not far from 1.25/4.2!)
Those will be built as (if) they are funded. The only funding currently secured is the bakersfield to merced leg.
The problem is, that leg is nowhere to nowhere and is going to cost over 100B dollars. Most people take that to mean that it's incredibly unlikely that the more costly portions of the route (the ones that make it useful) will ever get built as they will be absurdly expensive.
https://hsr.ca.gov/
I know that there are many factors affecting progress, but it's depressing that we can't get to consensus on building infrastructure.
Connecting them all up with rails and catenary is the (relatively) cheap, quick and easy bit, and it's done at the end - it's exactly all these structures (and the stations, which will likely be the next phase) that take all the time and money.
“and, by gum, it put them on the map!”
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakersfield_sound
[1]: https://hsr.ca.gov/high-speed-rail-in-california/project-sec...
That's a lie.
> windy-er to save money
The opposite: some segments are longer, more complex, and more expensive to gratify some NIMBYs and influential congressmen.
Isn't that going to be the world's slowest "hi-speed" train ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela
Reminds me of high-speed rail in France vs high-speed rail in Germany. To the point that newer Siemens trains will have a lower top-speed, because "there is no demand for it".
The Paris-Lyon line is by far the oldest, and is top-speed limited because of how it was traced. (And also because of its out-dated security system that is in the process of being changed)
The Paris-Brest line stops being a high-speed track in Rennes, so even if the first part is fast, it's still a long way to Brest on conventional tracks.
The newer lines are faster, as they are designed for theoretical operational speeds of 350 km/h, with a current operational top speed of 320. (LGV Sud Europe Atlantique, LGV Rhin-Rhone, LGV Est, and even the LGV Bretagne Pays-de-Loire going to Brest)
It would be more embarrassing if that gets built than if it doesn’t. Echos of Ted Stevens’ bridge to nowhere.
I lived in CA for 15 years. I've been all over it (incl central ca). This would be such a pyrrhic victory, that I lack words! Who the hell needs to commute enough between those two god-forsaken places to justify the billions spent on this?
Everyone owns a car and carpooling is trivial. Most homes have one car per adult.
There’s nothing of interest between Merced and Bakersfield. These were towns that grew from the old 99 freeway from Sacramento to Bakersfield and then on to LA.
You can get high speed rail built for people from SoCal to lose their asses at a backgammon table in Vegas faster but if you want to, idk, travel for non-recreational reasons within the Midwest and you don't want to sprint through O'Hare for a flight between where you're from and where you're going, you'll probably be driving despite years of asking for Amtrak to find a way to go above 79 MPH.
The US system is optimized for freight.
It's not obvious that passenger is a better choice.
The other aspect is how the rail infrastructure is financed in the US vs Europe. In the US the infrastructure is to a large extent funded by the freight companies themselves, and in return their needs get priority. Take away that incentive and they'll stop funding the rail infrastructure meaning that much of that cost will end up pack on either the local or federal government, with all that that entails.
The biggest issue is speed. The maximum speed is just slightly above that of maximum highway speed, with freight speed limited to less than half of that.
Population density in North Sweden and Norway is low enough that a few times a day is probably sufficient for most local travel. I haven’t been during peak tourist seasons when that number of trains might not be enough.
A fun fact is that since the ore trains travel mostly downhill, braking generates enough electricity that the ore empty trains can return to Kiruna effectively energy free.
That makes it a tourist line, not a transit line.
There's nothing wrong with tourism, but it isn't transit.
The Us transports nearly 10 times as much freight-km as the EU and far more than 10 times tons/person.
Rail operators have also discovered a really nice side effect of ultra long trains: you don't have to pull into a siding to let a passenger train by as required by law if your train is longer than the siding.
https://www.aar.org/issue/freight-train-length/
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/action-plan-...
-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-ameri...
The continental US (no Alaska or Hawaii) is > 22.5 times as big as Germany but has only 8.8 times as many miles of "navigable waterways." (However, it's not clear if the US numbers include the Great Lakes or the oceans; LA to Seattle and Miami to NYC goes by ocean, not some river.)
But, that doesn't leave much for the rest of Europe.
I mean, sure, you can get to Kansas City and Omaha via the Missouri. You can't get to Denver, though, or Phoenix, or Salt Lake, or...
I find that very unlikely and this link seems to contradict that: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Another aspect that needs to be taken into account is that a large part (perhaps 40%) of any number you see on total tonnes of rail freight in Sweden, is made up of handful of short rail lines doing nothing but transporting iron ore from a few large mines to the nearest harbour.
You claimed that there were "many" countries that had both good freight and passenger rail, but have yet to come up with one. (Sweden isn't an example - its "good freight" service (mines to ports) is where there's insignificant passenger service.)
Your response to the first high-speed rail line America is likely to see completed, being built by a private operator, is to propose effectively banning it?
Nationalisation in a country like the US generally means getting bought out at a fair, even generous, price.
Can you show me one example from the post-War era where we nationalised something that wasn’t about to fail?
If we don't nationalise things that aren't about to fail then why should anyone be scared of being nationalised?
Nobody is currently afraid of it, probably because no one is seriously contemplating it.
We have the MTA in NY, they run the railroads and subways. The agency is massively bloated by costs not just where it costs $1.5 billion per mile to expand the subway, but even the railways are bleeding billions per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline
2. We don't want 40% more trucks on the roads, so we need the system to still be able to carry large amounts of freight. The federal government is also not known for doing that well, still less for balancing that with #1.
3. In this country, we don't just get to nationalize things. We have to pay for them. Given the pathetic rate at which Amtrak is funded, do you really think that Congress is going to spring for the kind of money to buy all the freight railroads?
4. Speaking of Congress, it's going to take continual funding to pay for keeping the system maintained. Do you want the annual maintenance budget for this (including the freight portion) to be at the annual whims of Congress?
All around, this is a terrible idea.
There's loads of billionaires out there now with more money than sense. Get together a PAC, lobby them to fund high-speed rail upgrades, name a rail station after them or something.
if they don't want the tax they can hurry up and build the nice shit first.
Moving people around tends to not be that great a business in general. Providing them services once they are there is a money printing machine.
I don't think the commenter meant this route was especially unfeasible. I think they were referring to the fact that the track record (no pun intended) of high speed rail projects in the U.S. is mixed to terrible.
Whereas another certain California rail project literally transports you from [place you need car] to [place you need car]. Which I don’t think I need to explain why that is silly.
The root cause of this is blue states often get Euro public transport envy — yet they don’t understand Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) of the US. Obviously public transport would start to make a lot more sense if you 3X’d the population in the same land area.
IMO fetishizing the European way of life is a bit silly, given density comes with its own problems (ie nobody having kids). In fact, there was this German guy in the 1930s who led the killing of millions of people partly to get more “living space”, so European density does have its downsides for…shall we say…stability. In fact, Europe has roughly the same amount of people today as it had in 1939. Meanwhile the US has more than doubled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ
In most things, if you post a comment with points of discussion you get a thoughtful response here.
However on HN trigger topics, you get emotionally downvoted and nobody wants to engage in discussion.
Instead of linking to a youtube video from the r/fuckcars filter bubble, is there any succinct points to refute why a 3X greater population density would not naturally result in greater public transportation formation?
Or is it just the "dumb americans" and their "evil car culture?" With no further investigation of the first-principles reasons that culture was formed?
You are also starting from the assumption that higher population density is better for high speed rail, which is easily countered with my previous point. An argument could be made that, practically, high speed rail is really better suited to places with low population densities centered around urban areas... like the unpopulated parts of the US West.
HSR is expensive and requires high degrees of funding and coordination. In other words there has to be a strong political and cultural will behind it, so yeah, it stands to reason that the US doesn't want it since they certainly have the money to do it if they want. Maybe there is a culture around forms of transportation that is particular to the US...
i’ve been using this example for about a decade.
of course, that route didn’t exist 20 years ago when I took Madrid to Seville. I can’t imagine what the population density of Seville is.
it would help if you give us the numbers you’re working with. I sure hope you aren’t doing the population density of the entire country. That’s a common mistake.
While you're checking the provided citation, you might want to compare those countries' fertility rates too (and others as well, of course – France's for instance is quite a bit higher than that of the US': 1.82 vs. 1.67). You have yet to demonstrate that your hypotheses are well supported by data.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Genuinely curious what is meant by this since if I was asked what the most progressive ideal city layout was I'd respond with extensive, highly connected, frequent metro lines with islands of density around the stations that included plenty of non-market rate housing options within easy walk of each station. When more housing is needed extend the lines and start a whole new island of density. Make sure plenty of public green space is accessible from the metros just beyond the density islands.
Inter-city connections would be broadly similar, just zoomed out. Each city an island of density connected by fast and frequent rail.
Creating hardwired infrastructure to transport people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be, over timespans measured in decades for construction and a good part of a century to pay off, at a time when technology is delivering more options for individual mobility concurrent with other options that render commuting and travel less relevant, doesn't strike me as progressive.
I'm a huge fan of ebikes and other micromobility solutions for solving the last mile problem that has always plagued rapid transit, especially in low density areas. You want to move huge amount of people any significant distance? You need a train. Pretty much every proposal I've seen to move masses of people without a train ends up being train but worse, either in OPEX or CAPX (usually both).
Of course, you're comparing a single rail line to a single road, rather than to the entire network of roads that could have been built with the same funding in a fraction of the time, but... that's why I offered the OP the advice I did.
When you compare total CAPX and OPEX including the vehicles themselves and then actually moving people from place to place trains crush everything else. A highway-mile might be cheaper to build than a rail-mile, but it requires maintenance and replacement far more often and the vehicles don't last any where near as long. Large amounts of total costs like vehicles and fuel are shifted to the traveller, reducing the options for many unless they meet a certain economic threshold.
And yet when people have a choice, they take their car.
And nobody ever asks why. They just stamp their feet and demand more trains.
I have no issue with people choosing a car. I have issues where a car is the only choice due to the built environment being actively hostile to all other forms of transportation. Walking --> Cycle --> Train depending on how far you want to travel is far more sustainable and opens options for far more people than car-centric infrastructure where only a car is functional.
Building out a train network also doesn't mean we shouldn't also have a quality road network as well; there are plenty of long tail needs where a vehicle that can go direct point-to-point is very valuable. We just need to be building more than just a road network as roads alone simply cannot handle the needs all travellers.
That just false. Yes some people prefer cars, others don't. Overwhelming evidence shows that people most often prefer what the fastest thing is, and secondarily what the cheapest is.
I have plenty of money for a car, and I don't use one. So apparently I don't exist. Talking in absolutes makes you seem foolish.
The question you should be asking is, looking at society as a whole, whats and efficient and green way to meet the transportation needs of the population.
The reality in most cities less then 50% of population have cars, often much less. And that is after 50 years of pro-car policy. And literally every other possible benefit for cars.
What you should actually educate yourself on is that HUGE AMOUNT of pro car subsidies that actually exist in the real world. Of course if you make parking free, ram a highway right into the city center (burning existing communities down) and then make those people not even pay for the cost of that, then they will prefer the car.
If you design your roads in a why that makes it incredibly dangerous for anybody that is not in a car, guess what, more people take cars.
> And nobody ever asks why. They just stamp their feet and demand more trains.
There is actually lot of people that ask why. There is lots of research on this topic.
This research you clearly ignore because you have already made up your mind.
So maybe you should ask the 'why' question about your own position and study the history of it.
The reality is cites don't move, and population don't move very much either. And once you actually have fixed trains, population are even less likely to move. Many cities in Europe have literally been in the same place for 1000+ years.
Your augment might apply to mongolians in 1800s, but not to real existing western society.
Living in a country with amazing public transport, its just amazing what you can do. I was using public transport by myself when I was like 10, by 14 I was traveling all over the country and by 16 internationally without parents.
I can at any part of the day, randomly decide to go literally to any village above 100 people (and sometimes below), check and App that gives me a step by step guide how to get there. I have no fixed cost (if I don't want to) and then I can efficiently reach my destination while using almost no carbon. How is this not progressive? And btw, this can be done by anybody from 14 to late 70s. And this works right now, not in some amazing techno utopia future.
And I can use may laptop with high speed internet. I can easily go to a high quality bakery in between and get a high quality meal without losing any travel time either.
How non progressive it is to sit in a nice quite place with my laptop, eating a sand-witch driving threw beautiful country side.
A railway is simply the most efficient way to transport goods and people and if you have city and you have a lot of people, it will always be better then whatever 'individualized fancy AI pod' you imagine.
Notice how those companies working on all these individual pods eventually come back to 'platooning' and then 'docking'. Then they realize that operations on rubber wheels suck. Just slowly reinventing trains. The same techno future ideas existed in the 60s.
The fact is 2 cities exist, and will continue to exist. People will want to continue travel between them, that was true 100 years ago and its true today, and its still true in 100 years. Rail ways were the most environmentally friendly and efficient way to do that, both 100 years ago, and still today and it will still be true long into the future.
And its absolutely perfectly compatible with the most intelligent individual of transport, the bike. Getting on low impact, high threw-put trains to connect urban centers (urban doesn't mean big city) and then having individual transport in terms of bikes and e-bikes waiting for you is by far the most progressive and most innovative transport system you can design today. People on bikes will navigate more efficiency then whatever AI pods some California startup will come up with.
In Netherlands a staggering amount of people arrive at the train station by bike and they can easily pick up another bike when the arrive at their location. This is not only incredibly green, incredibly energy efficient, its also good for health and fitness (one of the biggest public health crisis) and road safety.
And the sad thing is, non of these are fancy high tech solution. These are literally all technologies that existed 50 years ago. But we should really way for some company to finally sell us some individualized EV pods that cost 40k$ per pod.
Fixed rail is the only reasonable way to get large numbers of people in and out of cities.
- walking and cycling takes too long
- cars lead to congestion and you need to store them somewhere
- flying has security overhead and is terrible for the environment
Direct from Wikipedia:
“Lebensraum (Living space) was the leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II”
The Germans wanted 'Lebensraum' because they didn't want to import food and resources from others. They didn't want to relay on anybody else. They wanted the German race to dominate those resource areas. They wanted to compete in the great power game with US, Britain and the Soviets.
You act like they saw the apartment buildings in Berlin, decided that was 'to dense' and therefore they started WW2. That is simply not accurate.
Their aim was not to reduce density, but rather massively increase the population of the German race. Their policy was literally pro population growth. Their 'Lebensraum' was not for currently existing Germans, because German was to dense. The 'Lebensraum' was for future generations of German Supermen that they would literally breed.
I am serious by the way that this is an utterly disgusting way to argue. You should seriously be ashamed of yourself. I know that housing policy makes people insane, but you responding with 'Hitler genocide is because of urbanization' is the lowest level of argument I have come across.
Anyways, being confronted with contrarian ideas on the supremacy of European urbanism is clearly triggering for you (proving the point I made earlier). So much so that you feel the need to resort to ad-hominem personal attacks!
I won’t be responding anymore, but I recommend examining why you’re revisiting a thread days later to call a random stranger on the internet “utterly disgusting” for challenging your feelings on this topic.
> for challenging your feelings on this topic.
Don't flatter yourself, you aren't 'challenging' anything. There are plenty of arguments you can make about Urbanism and I have heard plenty of of them. Reasonable people can differ and I'm fine with that.
> I recommend examining why
Because you are using the suffering, death and rape of millions to justify your position.
> days later
Yeah whole 'days'. I mean its like you wrote this in the 1960s.
> Instead of linking to a youtube video from the r/fuckcars filter bubble, is there any succinct points to refute why a 3X greater population density would not naturally result in greater public transportation formation?
Do you really not understand how aggravation works?
Somehow the US can have very dense subways in New York, how is this possible, the US isn't dense. Its as if aggregate statistics aren't a good indicator when doing regional transportation planning for a region.
The root cause is that blue state Americans are still toxically individualist and anti-social and can’t undertake collective projects for shit. Europeans are at least somewhat orderly—in part because in several countries the disorderly anti-social people left for America: https://www.ft.com/content/dd212e0f-508a-3171-824c-d6076ae19....
If you’re built like a linebacker, you should give up your dreams of becoming a world-class ballet dancer. Likewise, blue states should give up the delusion that they can build large scale public projects like Europeans and Asians.
You’ve got the wrong color unless you think right leaning Americans are even worse than this description.
… should give up the delusion that they can build large scale public projects…
The highway system is a counterexample.
That does seem to be exactly the point. Notice the word "still".
Indeed, California isn’t very good at being a blue state. Its educational rankings are near the bottom. It doesn’t have universal healthcare. It doesn’t have good transit. Its cities aren’t safe and clean and homeless people aren’t taken care of. California—the beating heart of globalist financial capitalism, with some of the highest income inequality in the country—is much better at being a red state than even Texas.
Your take, as usual, is badly wrong. You fail to take into account pertinent facts and draw the wrong conclusion. Here’s one pertinent fact: California subsidizes states like Mississippi. California is also hamstrung by the fact that isn’t its own country. There are limits to what it can do given these two facts.
How? All the areas where California falls short—education, transportation, housing, healthcare, etc.—are ones left primarily to the states. For example, state and local governments provide 90% of educational funding, while the federal government provides only 10%. No federal law is stopping California from levying Sweden-like taxes to provide Sweden-like education, transportation, healthcare, and housing services.
It’s true that, under our system of progressive taxes, Californians pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes—because they make more money. They pay about 13% of all federal taxes, and get back about 83% of what they pay in federal services. That nets out to about $100 billion net transfer out. But that’s out of an economy of $3.9 trillion. That’s just 2.5% of California’s GDP. That money isn’t what’s standing between California and having high quality social services.
I think in many cases right leaning Americans are even worse in that regard. (E.g. tatted up Trump supporters and anti-vaxxers.) Orderly traditional conservatives are a minority on the right today.
> yet they don’t understand Europe has 3X the population density
Aggregated statistic comparison are completely meaningless. They might serve in a low-quality online rant but not much more then that.
California has many cities over 500k people and some with many millions connect in a line. The idea that there isn't enough population density is total nonsense.
Switzerland has towns with 100 people in low density areas that have regular public transport. The idea that cities like LA and Bay Area are to small or not dense enough is insane.
> IMO fetishizing the European way of life is a bit silly, given density comes with its own problems
Again, you totally misusing density statistics and that invalids your whole argument completely.
> comes with its own problems (ie nobody having kids). In fact, there was this German guy in the 1930s who led the killing of millions of people partly to get more “living space”, so European density does have its downsides for…shall we say…stability.
What complete and other nonsense are you peddling now? Nothing said here makes any sense at all.
hing Hitler was a zero-sum thinker who didn't believe in density and that's why he thought conquering more land was a good idea.
Also invoking Hilter and Genocide in a argument about trains in California is such a insane thing do. It shows that you have no interest in real debate and rather spout inflammatory nonsense about Hitler.
> In fact, Europe has roughly the same amount of people today as it had in 1939.
At least try to look up basic statistics:
558,000,000 -> 746,225,356
And to somehow relate this to some argument about density doesn't make any sense anyway so its completely idiotic to bring it up in an argument about trains in California.
First, aggregated statistics matter a lot, especially when examining the history of why humans have clustered in the US the way they have.
Second, nobody is saying public transport doesn't make sense inside the most dense US cities like LA, SF, etc (yes NYC exists). The issue is the network beyond those areas, due to suburbanization. The topic of this thread is building high speed rail to a suburban desert location.
Third, when discussing internet people's fetishization of European density over American suburban sprawl, its not crazy to bring up downsides -- of which there are many. It's true, the German desire for territorial expansion (and resulting World Wars and Genocides) were a direct result of perceived overpopulation. I dunno...I would call that a downside?
I know it's impossible to understand for an internet person in 2024, but childless urban living wasn't always cool and aspirational. Why do you think the automobile found such strong product-market-fit in the 1900s.
> At least try to look up basic statistics: 558,000,000 -> 746,225,356
If we want to argue of the semantics of "roughly the same," I'd say 35% growth qualifies when comparing a US population that grew 250% over the same time and a world that grew by 400%.
That's not what you did and its not what I objected to. But do play up the whole victim complex you have going on.
You are truly hitting all the 'alt-right' highlights. First make grand statements using totally misleading statistics then when this is pointed out to you react with 'Oh sorry I'm not allow to question things'.
There are actually good statistics that you could have used to make your point, but you didn't.
> Second, nobody is saying public transport doesn't make sense inside the most dense US cities like LA, SF, etc (yes NYC exists).
All of these huge places are by far big enough to have a robust local and regional public transit network. And then you connect those networks with an inter-regional connection, making both networks stronger by doing so.
That argument might not make sense to connect NYC with Denver. But it makes a hell of a lot of sense for LA and the Bay area. Specifically when both are trying to expand their public transit network and there are major cities in between where people would like to access both the Southern and the Northern regional transport networks.
> The issue is the network beyond those areas, due to suburbanization.
Aggregate density statistics would look the same no matter if urbanization or suburbanization.
> Third, when discussing internet people's fetishization of European density over American suburban sprawl, its not crazy to bring up downsides -- of which there are many.
And yet of those many non of the ones mentioned were correct or made sense or had statistical evidence backing them up. Maybe that why you got pushback.
Then you spun into some nonsense argument about Hitler.
> It's true, the German desire for territorial expansion (and resulting World Wars and Genocides) were a direct result of perceived overpopulation.
Assuming this was true, the term 'perceived' is meaningless. People can 'perceive' anything if they want to with enough ideology. The evidence would have clearly point out that they were wrong.
And people like you making argument in favor of those wrong positions against evidence are part of the problem with that perception.
> I dunno...I would call that a downside?
You are literally reducing WW2 to an argument about housing density. That completely ridiculous.
What matters to the Nazis was not relative density of urban areas but rather the TOTALITY of LAND and RESOURCE under state control. The wanted this to compete with continental scale powers like US and the Soviets.
So their conquests and ideology had LITERALLY nothing to do with urban housing density. They didn't see Berlin and think 'man people are so close together here, I guess we need to conquer Ukraine. That just total wrong, your argument is 100% wrong.
I suggest you read Adam Tooze work on Interwar and WW2 economics.
In terms of their architecture and city design they were french and Napoleonic inspired.
> I know it's impossible to understand for an internet person in 2024, but childless urban living wasn't always cool and aspirational. Why do you think the automobile found such strong product-market-fit in the 1900s.
The largest expansion in human population happened when humans started to live together more closely during the industrial revolution. And immigrants who usually have more kids most often move to cities as well.
The biggest fear of the 'over population' crazy people are mega cities like Delhi and Lagos.
Unless you have really amazingly solid statistics about humans living in density having much lower child rates when taking into account education, wealth and other factors. But you have not presented any such evidence. You have just asserted it to be true.
And even if it was true, to create urban sprawl just in the vague hope that people are gone have more kids is insane.
> If we want to argue of the semantics of "roughly the same,"
If you think '35%' qualifies as 'roughly the same' I question your sanity.
Need I remind you that you used pre-WW2 statistics and millions of people got displaced or killed? And millions of men died, leading to less kids? That had long term effects on population.
So if anything that 35% totally under-sells how many people would be in Europe how had WW2 not happened. So the argument that Europe grew less was related to housing density is nonsense.
WW1 had happened and reduced long term growth potential, then WW2 happened and made it worse. So of course for the next couple decades the US had a powerful economy and literally millions of Europeans went to the US and had kids there and many millions of Mexicans and Cubans (and many others) moved to the US. And non of that happened because of housing density.
https://youtu.be/11Noo855zyA
The only real challenging part of the route is going to be pass out of the inland empire where the I-15 grade is a really steep. The rest of the project is pretty straightforward, with rights of way already in place and very few expensive and complex grade crossings. They picked this city pair and route very carefully to have an excellent chance to succeed both on construction simplicity and ridership. I'm not sure they will actually open in time for the 2028 Olympics, but I wouldn't bet against 2029 operations.
As for high speed, it won't be able to sustain true high speed rail velocity across the whole route (150mph / 250 kph), but it will be much faster than driving and there will be long stretches that are very high speed.
Both takes are oblivious to the problem domain, to the point that you didn't even realize your worst-case scenario is completely irrelevant and doesn't even put any of the project's aspects into question.
Keep in mind that this is an infrastructure project. The expected outcome, such as the Interstate Highway System, is providing the US with infrastructure that is of critical importance to the local, state, and national strategic interests. Taking 10 years to build is not a problem because infrastructure projects often take decades to pull through. See Switzerland's Gotthard Base Tunnel and how it took billions to build and decades from signing off until being opened to the public.
Being non-high-speed is also perfectly ok. The difference between high-speed and non-high-speed in practice is the door-to-door travel time being close to 3h instead of around 1h30m. Once you start to think about it, you'll eventually realize airplanes take far longer than that to cover the same door-to-door trip as the flight itself takes less than a third of the time. In fact, it's widely established that commercial flights are only competitive with regards to high-speed trans for distances greater than ~600km, and trains remain competitive for half the distances if you have their commercial speeds.
More interesting, high-speed is just a brand. The important property is commercial speed, and you can have non-high-speed lines outperforming high-speed lines. A textbook case is Britain's high-speed rail network, whose top speed is ~160km/h, which is considerably slower than France's ~320km/h, but still ensures high commercial speeds as the track layout was designed to allow trains to constantly circulate at speeds close to the top speed.
[0] https://www.openrailwaymap.org//mobile.php?availableTranslat...
I was referring to Britain's adoption and pervasive use of its InterCity 125 trains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterCity_125
The interesting aspect of the InterCity 125 was the fact that, instead of going with an optimized record breaking train, British Rail went the other way around and optimized their track layouts to allow an unimpressive train to achieve what was at the time unmatched commercial speeds.
Just to be clear, this is to the "greater Los Angeles area", ending at Rancho Cucamonga station, a 48 minute drive (1h15m by public transit) to downtown LA, and a 1h15m drive (2h30m by public transit) to LAX.
And many cities even build office blocks and hotels on top of their railway stations. See London, Paris, Berlin, etc.
Why America is allergic to having a big central railway station in the middle of a city, I will never understand.
What reasons? They're building new right-of-way from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas; doing that from Rancho Cucamonga to downtown LA is much harder, because there's all this city in the way. Now, there's existing rail there, but it's heavily used, and negotiating access won't be cheap. (Building an additional track along it also won't be cheap.)
My default assumption right now is that this sort of grand construction is generally infeasible in countries outside of China where they generally don't care who they displace or the environmental damage, and often are building the cities from the ground up in the first place with the trains as a part of the urban planning.
I've been peripheral to a few urban light/heavy rail expansion projects in the US and the consistent issue is that even cities with a lot of urban sprawl are still dense enough that you have to displace a lot of people/businesses to build a new line and the stations around it. It's the sort of thing that's a lot easier to do when the city is young, or the train line got built in an era where you could just force people to sell their houses and move.
I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
Malmö: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Tunnel_(Malm%C3%B6)
Proposed lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_rail_infrast...
I can't see a Wikipedia category for recent extensions.
It will very often make sense to connect the hundred year old station to a new major line, but as with Leipzig and Malmö they also build additional stations in the centre of the city.
The recipe is really simple: don't do megaprojects. Individual projects must be of appropriate size for the level of government that is making the decisions. When there are several projects of similar size in the pipeline all the time, the government can develop and maintain the expertise needed to build the infrastructure.
Do you see a lot of unity in the US or Europe these days?
It's why all the rail megaprojects are happening in Asia these days.
There's a lot of ongoing extensions, but into existing train station.
Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
https://www.zvv.ch/zvv/en/about-us/projects/in-betrieb/cross...
https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/projects/german-speaki...
(Switzerland has bunch of those since they typically expand capacity with 20-30y horizon)
Also, kinda tough reading that Stuttgart link where it seems like it was generally unpopular and the police did crimes to suppress dissent. I don't really know the details to have an opinion on if they're right, but still.
But given it's Switzerland they just decide to do it all underground.
Closer to home I'd point to Montreal REM which will be 67 km of track in new elevated guideway when it's all done using automated trains. Phase 1 opened last summer. They did re-use an existing tunnel through downtown, but it needed extensive repairs and reconditioning as it hadn't been is use for nearly a century.
If you're interested in what systems around the world look like and what's been possible to build I'd highly recommend RMTransit. Canadian like me, so many videos are focused here, but he has tons of explainers on metro and train systems all over the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express
https://www.youtube.com/@RMTransit
Yes, absolutely. London's Crossrail opened a few years ago. Paris has been building new RER lines almost continuously.
> I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
Upgrading the existing station and existing lines, or building new lines along the same right-of-way, usually makes sense - the station is already in the right place and connects up to the existing network. E.g. Roma Tiburtina was basically completely flattened and rebuilt, but it's technically an "upgrade".
You're mostly right though, to build a new station in a city you absolutely do need a large block that you can reasonably demolish - e.g. in London the planned next high-speed rail station at "Old Oak Common" will be accommodated by demolishing a big prison (Wormwood Scrubs), and it's not exactly central. Or you build completely underground, but that's expensive and you still need to demolish stuff to make a worksite.
Frankly building a new station somewhere somewhat out of town is perfectly reasonable as a way of saving money, and generally a new business district will gradually spring up around the station - see e.g. Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, or Shin-Osaka. But you need good metro connections with the CBD, at least to start with, otherwise you end up like Haute-Picardie. IMO a lot of people who want high-speed rail in the US are putting the cart before the horse: you need to build a decent metro in a city before having high-speed rail to that city makes sense, and this kind of thing is exactly why - and one of the reasons this line works is exactly that it can go to a more "outlying" station because LA is one of the few cities in the US that has been building new metro lines over the last few decades.
Section 2 finished in 2007 (just within your 20 year cutoff!) It links the channel tunnel with London St Pancras. Much of the London part is in tunnels and it is 100% grade separated.
The uk High Speed 2 route was also going to do this and build a new high speed rail line and station into London, but the exact issues you describe seem to mean that it will be halting at a point outside London instead possibly using existing tracks.
Overall though, High speed rail doesn't need new tracks into cities unless all the existing lines are full (or they are too slow)
It's much easier to build high speed line in the countryside and link it to the existing lines that run to existing stations in cities.
(Also the Elizabeth line in London, but's more like a metro really, even if it is 'heavy' rail)
Though, somewhat funny to me that it seems like it all got paid for by Canadian pensions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_1
There have of course also been several urban rail projects within Greater London during that time.
Other examples of relevance:
* LGV Sud Europe Atlantique * Wendlingen–Ulm high-speed railway * pretty much all of Spain's high-speed rail network.
If China can push 286 mph in Shanghai, which means the tech exists, then why isn't this comparable? This is not snark; I am just curious what makes the Chinese train capable of such speeds, but the US train can't.
instead you should see Japan's shinkansen as a measure of standards. They built that in the sixties
It's one the highest bars in the world, safer than Euro HSR. Wenzhou was the only large accident. Safety record after has been Shinkansen tier, except on largest network in the world. Crippled speed Brightline is already a deathtrap, US HSR would be fortunate to be a fraction as safe as PRC HSR.
I mean, most of Europe has, China has, it's not really a case of "nobody else" doing it.
What's missing in America is national unity and political will.
Are you talking about the Maglev train connecting Longyang Road Station on the Shanghai Subway Line 2, to Pudong International Airport?
If so, it is only 30km (19mi) long…
And of course high speed means higher cost. The average person is very price sensitive on transportation costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train
>After May 2021:
>Cruising speed: 300 km/h (186 mph)
>Average speed: 224 km/h (139 mph) (duration: 8 minutes and 10 seconds)
The bigger issue is likely:
>According to Chinese media's report, however, due to the huge costs of operating and the lack of the passenger flow, Shanghai Maglev Transportation Company would lose 500 million to 700 million RMB every year
It is pretty impressive and they're looking at building an extension. however oddly its operation speed has been significantly reduced from 268mph to 186mph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train
The basic problem is that Maglev is on average more expensive to build and operate and cannot (unlike ordinary high speed rail trains) ever operate on ordinary (non high speed) rail track.
It's also still pretty experimental, the Shanghai one is operational and high speed, all other operational systems are either low speed or experimental test beds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev
Regular high speed rail is a fairly routine thing and all the parts are well understood.
The problem is getting to the Brightline station since it's so far out from the middle of LA.
https://youtu.be/11Noo855zyA
Having branded luxury cars would be he fairly easy and could easily be a hit; private cars are unlikely to be feasible with your regular high speed electric multiple units.
[1]: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/28-amtrak-...
California's HSR is very far from last-mile connectivity being a problem, mostly due to the geometry of starting in the middle.
CA HSR Phase 1 is SF to LA with a spur up to Merced.
CA HSR Early Operating Segment is Merced to Bakersfield.
For example, I wouldn't consider taking a flight from Copenhagen to Århus (40 minutes vs 2¼ hrs) as the saving is wasted on waiting, and flying is much less comfortable.
(That's an extreme example for the distance, as it crosses a sea.)
It's certainly a competitor, but definitely not the preferred option.
Only for very specific routes. If I want go to from here to the one of the maybe 4 closest large cities, I'm definitely taking the train. If I want to to go from here to just about any other major city in Europe flying is almost always much faster. A bunch of people from work where going to a conference in Amsterdam a few years ago and some of them wanted to take the train for environmental reasons, and the train was literally 20+ hours door to door from the midsized European city I live in. Directly flights are under 2 hours.
Two hours flight time from Amsterdam is Italy or beyond, that's quite different.
But the train is much faster if you want to go from city center to city center for a distance that's a relatively short flight. Like London to Paris or Amsterdam to Frankfurt. If you want to go across Europe from one side to the other, the plane is much faster.
Aircraft fuel isn't taxed, but train 'fuel' (electric or diesel) is taxed.
Airlines can base their staff in a cheap country and pay lower wages, avoid unions etc.
Local governments subsidise airports to attract tourists/business. The railway already exists and doesn't get this subsidy.
I don't know how much these rail tickets will cost, but I find the math on that to be unlikely.
4x plane tickets, assuming rock bottom minimum $60 a head to basically anywhere, $180-240...
Hmm
Flat pricing + make ticket good for something like 2 weeks to ride whenever.
If there was such predictability and flexibility, they'd immediately significantly increase their ridership.
There's a dead reply below that says "shinkansen are cheaper when bought in advance" --- I was led to believe otherwise, good to know as I ride it a few times a year.
Compared to trains being run as a semi government provided utility, like the Netherlands, where pricing is flat based only on route. Makes the train a more relevant alternative, which helps with road congestion. But tax money is used to build railways and stations, the tickets only pay for operating the train itself.
This can only possibly work with low ridership numbers. Imagine getting to the railway station with your bags and all seats are spoken for.
Honestly LA to LV is probably not bad it’s the right distance, it’s mostly desert so most of the HS2 issues will be avoided. If it’s actually high speed eg 200mph+ then I could see it working.
Edit: oh it’s 100mph, and it stops 37 miles outside of LA. Should rename it HS3
There is also going to be two intermediate stops in California at “Hesperia and one in Apple Valley.” (1)
So, 3.5 hours or so for guessing $100 one way versus 4-5+ hours at $40 gas 30mpg 220miles by car vs 1hr 8 minutes gate to gate $21-$60 by air without including security for any options.
They mentioned a metro link stop for LA but nothing about a plan for quite a ways off the strip in Las Vegas. Maybe a shuttle stop on the airport - car rental return loop. It’s going to be opposite the Las Vegas South Premium Outlets at Warmsprings rd and Las Vegas Blvd.
I compare to Brightline’s other rail project from Miami to Orlando. Tickets $80-$300 for similar mileage. Their high speed rail ended up with 70mph to a record 130mph.
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/brightline-from-miami-to...
(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/04/20/high-speed-...
> The federal government is increasingly embracing private business collaboration in its space missions, space-based projects and to power the new US Space Force as it ramps up in Los Angeles. This is creating a lot of activity and opportunity for LA-based aerospace companies.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/exclusive-inside-area-51-the-se...
> Jacobsen, a contributing editor and investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, interviewed the former Area 51 employees in 2008 and 2009, shortly after the CIA declassified much of the work they had done.. Jacobsen reveals some of the wild research that went on in the 1970s at Area 51 -- where the military built the U-2 spy plane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51
> Area 51 is located in the southern portion of Nevada, 83 miles (134 km) north-northwest of Las Vegas.
Lots more environmental studies to be done.
Lots more interests involved. How many private individuals had to be imminent domain'd for JWST?
I imagine there will be more people employed building the rail, but overall lower average salaries.
If you want real ridership, public transit in both LA and LV needs to be functional.
Connect it to Union Station and LAX if you want some ridership. On the Las Vegas end make it stop smack in the middle of the strip.
Otherwise this thing is useless.
Also 125mph is not high speed rail. LA-LV in 2 hours + time spent getting to the train station + buffer time to avoid missing the train + long slow car rental line on the other end while 15 people ahead of you each have a chit chat with the one employee dealing with the rentals would be more time than just driving end to end. These people just don't get it.
Try LA-LV in 1 hour and maybe we're talking. But really, fix public transit in both cities first.
The speed claims are good: going in saying it will be shinkansen fast, 350kph would be suicidal when it can't do it. Going to market on 125MPH means when they exceed it (and they will) it will be better for them.
I think they have made savvy financial choices. I get your pushback, it will suck living the commute delays either side. You think it kills it. I think it's a forcing function.
In countries where it works, it's a non-issue to get to/from the train station on both sides, and the train stations have ample good food options (real food; not a Dunkin Donuts), clean restrooms, direct connections to subways without having to even exit the building. It's an all-around pleasant experience.
I suppose, if they can go to market on 125mph, fine, but I'm rather pessimistic that anyone who lives in LV or LA (especially) would use it considering the sad state of public transit in both cities.
To be honest, faster rail between Boston - NYC - Washington (on the order of 1.5 hours between Boston-NYC and 1.5 hours between NYC-Washington, which is doable at Shinkansen/CRH speeds) would be a better market in my opinion until the west coast can get their shit together with public transit (if ever). There's plenty of business need on the east coast for faster trains, the space for the rails is already carved out by Amtrak's stupidly-slow Acela Express, and all 3 cities have excellent public transit, good enough that a significant chunk of the population of all 3 actually lives car-free.
In Europe and Asia I've never had a situation in an urban area where there wasn't an easily accessible public bathroom within a couple blocks.
People in SF complain about piss on the ground. Yet I've had to piss on the ground waiting 45 minutes for the Caltrain because the goddamn Caltrain bathrooms were closed for the rest of the night and the Panera next door wouldn't let me use theirs. What do you expect?
The Brightline website says their trains in Florida have toilets, I don't see why California would be any different.
i find there to be quite a few things to love about Europe over the US, but the idea of toileting as superior in Europe than in the US strikes me as odd. colloquially, i chalk it up to travel/cultural anxiety and stress because i can find a place/way to toilet in SF, NYC, or Orlando far more easily than in Paris, Florence, or Frankfurt
https://www.paris.fr/pages/les-sanisettes-2396
They don't want homeless people using them.
This isn't rocket science.
It sucks but it’s not a young minimum wage worker’s primary job.
https://www.maps.stadt-zuerich.ch/zueriplan3/Stadtplan.aspx?...
I found plenty of free toilets in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and plenty of pay toilets in Stockholm and Oslo. In Germany I usually looked for supermarkets, train stations, fast food restaurants, but come to think of it, Germany was harder.
The drive costs around $40 in gas one-way. If this train is indeed $80 per ticket one-way, then I fail to see how it will be competitive with driving. A group of 5 going to Vegas would pay 10X the cost of driving and lose a lot of flexibility.
But they'd gain back the time they would have spent driving. Pretty much everyone I know in Los Angeles flies to Las Vegas, though it's an admittedly biased sample.
Huh what? Almost everyone I know in LA drives to Las Vegas just to avoid having to deal with airports. And when you arrive in Las Vegas you already have your favorite car filled with your favorite snacks.
I’ve probably driven 100+ days in Vegas over the years and doubt I’ve paid more than $100 in total for parking over that span.
The US is only fifty years late.
The UK is finished with ambitious infrastructure (and house building), as we are a populous country of rich and influential NIMBYs with a party often in power that panders to them
In 1947 a law was passed requiring trains above 79mph to have some kind of automatic train stop system, so that ended most of the high speed steam service.
https://youtu.be/hVtVk3T80hA?si=Y8PYYt4IRakKLRDg
FTA:
>Brightline West [...] aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track almost all in the median of Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California. It would link there with a commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles
https://metrolinktrains.com/schedules/?type=station&originId...
So cut the commuter rail crap and just send the bullet trains to downtown Los Angeles?
Put another way, they've cut 4 hours of driving into 3 hours of train riding where you can't even get 3 hours of sleep and have to haul your luggage to another platform, likely up and down some stairs, 2 hours into it. And you still need to deal with transit once you arrive, so add another hour to get wherever you're actually going in LA (if you're lucky with the traffic). Time savings is zero.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. Even if everyone who takes the train drives from Los Angeles to Rancho Cucamonga (or takes an Uber), they're still offsetting less-efficient transportation modes.
Also there are already plan for a major bus hub for the regional area in Cucamonga as well.
The magic that makes this work is that the right of way is down the middle of the existing I15 freeway. No real impact studies are likely necessary for that route, and once they hit Barstow, it’s quite flat.
Friday commute traffic out of LA and OC to the area at the bottom of the pass is absolutely impacted by the crush of traffic heading over the Cajun pass into the high desert. Not all of it is Vegas bound, but much of it is.
I am curious how they will get through the pass. I’m assuming they’ll lease ROW from either UP or BNSF, as they own the two sets of tracks currently over the pass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWHYRjYYLqY
it will be a fast line of ubers and yellow taxis
but okay 2005 called.
jokes aside, Brightline has delivered before. It has potential for grift but I think they’ll pull this one off. They already plan to use metrolink from downtown LA Union Station. not perfect but decent coordination.
Maybe it’s time to get serious about desalinization plants and get a pipeline to desert communities? They’ll sure as hell build an oil pipeline, so water should be an easy choice, right?
This is a definitional thing; for whatever reason US regulators define this as 'high-speed', but no-where which operates actually high-speed (ie pushing 300km/h) lines does. The LA-Las Vegas project, and the California high speed rail project, are high-speed by international standards, at least in parts.
No, 125mph/200kph is the standard international definition of high-speed rail. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#/med...
In the United States, "higher-speed" rail has been the term used for trains up to 125mph.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail#Definitions [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-speed_rail
Let’s be honest the project will take longer than expected and end up costing more than 12billion.
France is planning a new 410 km high speed rail line between Paris and Lyon for €12 billion [1]. That's $11.2 billion at current exchange rates, giving $25 million per km. That seems to be a pretty normal price for high speed rail in Europe [2] for routes that don't need tunneling.
So this US project is about 36% more expensive than a typical EU high speed rail project. Higher, but is it really enough higher to qualify for "what's wrong in the US"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_France#Unde...
[2] https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eca/special-reports/high-speed-r...
Another real possibility is the project starts and gets engineering plans developed certified and on the shelf and 2 billion is spent getting things going… only to run into a snag and never get completed.
(Google the high speed rail line from Iowa City to Chicago .. that was also fully funded .. and still 10 years later not a single mile of rail has been laid)
What would be the cost of a high-speed rail version of this?
EDIT: I stand corrected. I looked at the Coast to Coast "Vacation". https://www.amtrakvacations.com/trips/america-coast-to-coast
Currently searching on amtrak.com (they don't seem to make PDF schedules anymore, sadly!):
449 Lake Shore Limited BOS - CHI 22 h 22 m
5 California Zephyr CHI - EMY 52 h 57 m
Scheduled transfer time in Chicago Union Station is about 4 hours.
So this should take a total of about 79 hours.
It takes just over 3 days to travel from the Bay Area to NYC. The price is $281 [1].
Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free. You need to consider how much money a few days of hotel and restaurants would cost, so the comparison is complex. Also the room cost is not really per-person unless you are traveling alone.
[1] I looked up the price for June 11th.
It's important to note that that's 3 days in a coach seat. 3 days.
The food is terrible, like truly terrible.
We brought a bottle of Jack and had a decent enough time. Wouldn't choose it again.
It looks like the sleeper version is indeed quite expensive nowadays if you're doing it as one person.
How many days does it take to fly from SF to NYC?
> Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free.
First class? I've done the trip in a room and there's nothing first class about it. The bedding was suspect. Everything in the room felt old and dirty. In the dining car, you don't even get your own table. They cram you with other passengers. And for much of the trip, your view consists of corn fields and miles long CSX trains slowly chugging alongside your train. And to add insult to injury they was hours late ( 9 hours if memory serves ) so if you have friends or family waiting to pick you up, make sure to tell them to set aside the whole day. If you are a light sleeper, then you are not going to have a good time because the train wheels on the tracks are very loud. If you have cash to burn, then try it out for the experience. But it's not a trip I'd recommend or take again.
Regarding your bad experience on the train... it seems to me that a lot of quality went downhill during the pandemic, and I'm wondering if you went before or after the pandemic started.
On your comments about lateness and how hard it is for light sleepers. Your comments there are very true, and people who would be concerned with either of those should think twice before riding.
I love riding long-distance trains. But I don't kid myself: it is way longer and more expensive than flying. There is a reputation on Amtrak for severe lateness. And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse. People should definitely read negative reviews and look for common issues; if the common problems would be a problem for them, that should be a deal-breaker.
I agreed with you there. That commenter exaggerated the costs. My response was directed to the 'first class' portion of your comment.
> And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse.
My trip was many years ago. Before the pandemic. I personally don't think the 'first class' amtrak experience is worth the money unless amtrak upgrades everything about the experience.
The line connecting NorCal to SoCal is so much more productive that any other line being prioritized is crazy to me.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/bU7Ut84EPpipnLqA6
This is estimated to be a $12B project. $6.5B raised so far: $3B grant and $3.5B in tax-exempt, "private activity" bonds. Does anyone actually think the rest will come from investors? Of course not, the government will see a half-finished project that it supported and provide the funding to finish the job, including the inevitable overruns.
A private company receiving 6.5B (and likely, eventually $12+) of government money... no pressure or expectations to make any profit. Great deal if you can get it!
I’m not in support of private companies receiving subsidies, but at least do some research before reacting..
1- https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/08/04/how-brightline-is-changi...
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2024/03/08/brightli...
The rail infrastructure is publicly owned. But the rail infrastructure is open access that private companies can pay for. As far as I understand you can even have a public carrier but it must bid for access like its private counterparts do.
This has already led to an explosion of high quality high speed rail service in countries like Italy and Spain.
To rephrase, some things are not directly profitable but tend to have outsized profitable effects. E.g., the education budget doesn't directly generate profits, but educated people go on to get good jobs and pay a lot of taxes, refunding the cost of their education by many multiples.
The same goes for roads, highways, and rail. Not directly profitable, but they enable a lot of free movement that boosts the economy and, in turn, taxes.
The regulations of rail in the US are slightly perverted (freight rail interests dominate the discussion, usually). The economics of passenger rail in the western US are also difficult when large densities of people are so spread out and the only "primary" reasons for going from A to B are for recreation, not work/industry.
Aeroplanes used to be something just for rich people too. Heck, go back far enough and so were cars, or even bicycles. You've gotta build a bunch before it becomes something mass-population.
- Maintaining what's already there
- Select state-level projects, in some states
- Select municipal-level projects, in some cities
This means there's been a huge deficit in this kind of project at the federal level.
In saying that, I don't want to give the impression that I'm on some ivory tower. Via Rail, a crown corp, is our national rail operator, and it's riddled with issues with little in the way of meaningful solutions.
There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work. It's hard for me to imagine the federal government succeeding at that for any reasonable cost, and I suppose you could blame some of that on partisan bickering. But I also can't imagine California succeeding for any reasonable cost, and it's a one-party state, so there's no excuse.
At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep. My guess is that Birghtline found a few such people and that's their competitive advantage as a business.
This ends up being self-fulfilling. People don't trust the government, so they suffocate the project in fixed payscales and low-bid rules and endless reviews, and so the government can't get anything done, and so people don't trust the government...
> At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep.
Right - so you need to be able to hire those people and pay them something close to what they're worth, or build up that expertise over the long term by having a steady pipeline of projects and training people as you go. But voters don't trust these governments enough to empower them to do that.
Perhaps. But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it, and then you have a huge sunk cost that you don't want to cancel so it drags on forever, eroding trust even further.
Private companies have some advantages here. If they don't think the project will succeed, they will stop, because they know there's no payday. If it's due to bad laws, they will lobby (a bad word, I know) to change them. They'll fire people who don't perform. They'll look in all kinds of creative ways to find people who can get the job done. They'll stop and think about who might actually ride it, because they need the ticket revenue, so they will build the lines in the right places with the right stops.
Maybe all of that could be true for some governments. But there's a long way to go before the US or the California government is able to do any of those things.
Maybe. Maybe there's no alternative to doing a pipeline of progressively bigger projects with in-house management and accepting that the first few will suck. But if you're not willing to pay what the expertise costs then there's no way you'll make it work, you need to get that level of expertise in house. I'd think that if you're willing to pay top dollar then you have at least a chance of hiring the right people.
It would be amazing to book a high speed train from Amsterdam to Barcelona at prices competing with Aviation. But nobody cares about this at a pan-EU level.
The likely outcome of a whole-EU train system is something like the US system where Amtrak generally hits the major population centers, but leaves a ton of the US behind because when you talk about Federal priorities, a train from Denver to Dallas isn't a huge priority compared to LA to SF or Boston to NYC. Obviously the EU system would fare better because it's starting from a better base, but it's emblematic of the tradeoff between bottom-up and top-down planning and investment for something like this.
So there's not really any interest in selling tickets from Country A to Country C. Because country B has to put up with the traffic which is already resource-restricted. And they prefer their internal customers to get priority.
This way it will never end up as a reasonable alternative for flying. What's really missing in the EU is the ability to bypass cities. A train from Amsterdam to Barcelona has to cross right through the center of Antwerp, Brussels, Lyon (or a transfer in Paris through a horrible metro connection). It's not possible to have a direct train that bypasses all the cities straight to its destination. That would be a real alternative to flying. Considering the amount of flights between Amsterdam and Barcelona daily it's easily possible to fill a few direct trains. It's that stopping in every city center (without in-city facilities for high-speed tracks) that make it so horrible.
But anyway the EU really doesn't care about this at all and considering the huge construction durations they're too late for this to make a difference in climate change anyway.
I think if there were more free bathing facilities around, this would be a non-issue
I can only guess either you know homeless people that can afford such tickets, or you simply didn't RTFA.
Nice positive attitude btw.