ChuckO writes:
> [...] train travel is much better than a plane or driving.
Except for the time involved. To wit:
> I see no reason why high speed rail wouldn't work in more
> of the U.S.
I don't understand this kind of viewpoint. It's totally unsupportable, given the amount of research that's gone into it that comes up with the exact opposite result: there are very few routes in the US that could a) justify and b) support a high-speed rail link. You can't just build it; you have to get people to use it.
> I can see high speed rail going in between Chicago and Milwaukee
> and Kansas City and St. Louis. The latter might be more doable
> than people think.
Which people? People who have looked at both of these routes and come up empty? Maybe it has something to do with this:
> People in both cities have cars, but the distance (around 4 hours)
> is annoying enough for frequent intercity trabellers that a high
> speed
> train would be very appealing. If I could get to St. Louis in an
> hour,
> I'd go over there for fun more often.
The fact is that no one is going to be crazy enough to build a 250-mile long high speed rail line so that you can take it for fun. The ~250 mile route is roughly equivalent to Paris-Lyon, which you can do non-stop on TGV in about 2 hours. Not one hour, two. As I mentioned the other day, this is one of the "best cases" in the world! Paris-Lyon is the French equivalent of Washington-NYC, i.e., the most heavily travelled corridor in the country between two dense metro centers. Despite the fact that this 2 hour trip makes for plenty of "fun" the fact remains that only half of the non-auto travel between those two points is by rail: the other half is by air. When the line was built, everyone predicted that Air France would stop flying the route. Well, they were wrong. Surprise! The post office has even cut back on their use of their dedicated TGV trainsets, because trucks are (still!) more flexible; there was significant subsidization of the route by the government to push this line through. I'm glad it's there (I've used it to good effect on several times), but don't pretend it is a panacea. Don't forget that the US Postal Service is profitable (despite getting their lunch eaten by FedEx and UPS on a regular basis for the business-oriented overnight market); the French postal service is under no such requirement.
Joanna writes, about her ill-considered 24 hour x-country bullet train:
> don't trains already go across these mountains?
Yes, and they do so very slowly.
> factoring in the mountains might mean a two day trip
... a 24 hour trip is bad enough, but a 2 day trip is a vacation in and of itself. That's not travel: that's meandering. This is why I think Amtrak ought to sell their long-distance train routes to Disney or Carnival and they should make it a form of entertainment. It might be fun, but don't confuse it with viable 'transportation' . . . and yes, I have riden the California Zephyr several times and I enjoyed it. Just don't confuse it with "transportation" ...
You started your earlier post with "I should be able to get on a bullet train ..." -- no one who travels for a living agrees with you.
JC writes:
>> (Now you know why a "300km/hr train" averages 200km/hr in the best
>> case!)
>
> Because a lot of the tracks are not high speed tracks.
No, because a lot of train travel (and air travel too!) is taken up by the starting at the beginning and stopping at the end. The idea that you can posit a "250km/hr train" and then divide the distance by 250 to get travel hours for a trip is ludicrous. The California HSR people keep talking about SF-LA in 2.5 hours, and I have to wonder what they are smoking. That would be, on a route that has some downright awful geographic (not to mention political!) obstacles, the fastest train route in the world by a long-shot. It will never happen that way; they would be lucky, if the stars align, to get the flat part from Modesto to Bakersfield (again, about 250 miles!) in two hours -- and even that seems doubtful. The connection ito SF (over mountains and through urban sprawl) and the similar one into LA will be lucky to be an hour each, making their estimate off probably by 100%. I can leave my house in Oakland and be at the boardwalk in Santa Monica in under 3 hours on a cheap plane today; why would I be interested in a $20B train for this route?
Ravi writes:
> i really fail to understand why newark -> chicago should take more
> than 24 hours by train
It doesn't take more than 24 hours, it takes about 19 today (to NY/Penn) without high-speed rail (even with having to step aside for freight, it's only about an hour slower than it was 70 years ago -- and it's often close to on-time); my estimate for a TGV-style train was 12 hours (still significantly less than and average of 100mph). It's about 800 miles by the Interstate; tag-team truckers do this route in about 14 hours. If you drove it on a motorcycle, you know the reason for this: the mountains of Pennsylvania. The New York Central built their route from Chicago to New York 200+ miles out of the way of Pennsylvania (total trip: about 1000 miles) just to avoid the engineering aspects that Penn Central decided to tackle (including one of the few 360 degree pieces of track in the US): it paid off, as their (non-stop!) train could beat the Penn train on most days, though only by ~20 minutes.
12 hours for a trip that's 3+ in the worst case by air is just silly; 19 hours is a laugh riot. For comparison you can fly that route on any one of 7 airlines from either of Chicago's two airports (giving you flexibility depending on where you're starting from) into any of NYC's three major airlines (again, depending on where you are going) for about $80. Now that's public transportation!
Wojtek writes:
> noone in his right mind would advocate long haul train rides
I don't know where you got the idea I was doing that. In fact, I have gone to great pains to debunk the idea that it's feasable. And I did it in support of my position against yours that you should be able to get from most any cities to another on a train in any "civilized" nation. Harumph, civilized indeed.
> a good transportation system would be multi-modal one - each mode
> well connected to - and supplementing each other. Europe has such a
> system, the US does not
Europe has a system of _cities_ that makes this kind of network a natural; the US does not. European cities are denser at the core (except for a few, widely dispersed, examples). I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of cities I can travel to in the US where I don't need a car once I get there and still have a few left over to pick my nose. You can blame the neo-liberal ethic, but the fact is: people in the US decided to spread out in a way that Europeans largely didn't (until recently, that is ...).
If it is "easier to travel about in Europe," it's not because of some failing of politics in the US: it is due to centuries-old planning issues that favor this kind of travel. On the other hand, the US has much to recommend it for travel: less regulation has fostered an airline industry which lets one roam about the country at will for very low prices in a speedy fashion. The people I largely hear complaining about air travel these days bemoan the days when flying was less democratic (of course, they don't phrase it that way). Southwest (and these days Jet Blue) have significantly changed the mobility of USers in the last twenty years in a way that Europe can only dream of.
You think I've missed this point:
> The US auto-based transport system sucks, because it is
> grossly inadequate for the task it is supposed to perform.
You are the one who misses the point: the Interstate system in the US was NOT designed to be the way for people to go on vacation between the cities. It was designed principally as the cargo network for trucks (a role it fills admirably) and secondarily as a defensive measure: the Interstate Highway Commission is still under the budget authority of DoD some 60 years after its establishment. The fact that dad can fill up the stationwagon and take the family to Yelowstone is way down on the list of priorities for that system.
Ravi writes:
[ about trains in the NYC area ]
> as for the trains: they are mostly geared to transporting people
> into NYC and back (for corporate benefit).
As opposed to you going to the beaches? Sorry, I don't buy this "personal routing of public transportation" idea (Joanna's fantasy train from SF-NYC is another example): it's already the case that the per-passenger benefit is low, and you want to make it that much worse? Public transportation must be, by it's very nature, dense. You don't see cross-line connections on the Paris RER out in the suburbs, why would you see them in the woods of New Jersey? Suburb-suburb commuting is a relatively new phenomenon, representing a vast shift from the dense corridors that have supported rail in the past; cross-suburb corkers tend to have different hours and different needs that make putting high-density transportation links in place a waste of money.
-----
Somehow Wojtek's presentation (and critique) of my positions has gotten warped to: I want to remove trains from the earth. I don't know how he got it. I'm a big fan of all kinds of transportation; in the last month I've gone on trips where I used city busses, Greyhound, subways, light-rail, commuter rail, Amtrak, city subways, ferries, commuter air (shortest flight: 100 miles) and long-distance air (I fly about 12,000 miles per month these days, lucky me). In the past year you can add medium-distance traditional rail (Seattle-Portland), long-distance traditional rail (Madrid-Paris), high-speed rail (Paris-Lyon, Paris-London), monorail (Seattle), seaplane (Pacific Northwest) and helicopter (NYC), travelling to 17 states and 7 countries.
I've said it before many times: I'm for an expansion of the use of rail (cf the 'baby bullet' efforts of CalTrain, which I rode two weeks ago to visit a client after walking to BART and transferring to the new-ish Muni N "light-rail" line in SF; and the Capitol Corridor which I rode last weekend to visit my favorite 50s burger joint Redrum Burger in Davis, CA), but I think that the situations where rail is useful is limited (and largely overestimated by it's fans). Wojtek started this thread by complaining about the Baltimore to Pittsburgh route, but finished by admonishing Keith that rail is only good for "less than 200 miles" -- Baltimore to Pittsburgh is 250 by car, close to 340 by rail, and cuts across some crazy geography: it's just so much better to fly. My flight yesterday from Dulles (45 minutes by bus from Baltimore!) to Pittsburgh was 31 minutes long; I didn't fly them, but Independence Air will get you there for $79! It's just absurd to say that a train is "more civilized" than a 31 minute trip to where you have to go.
Live from seat 10F on UA 393 [PIT-DEN],
/jordan