> Unlike in much of the rest of the world, the United States’ rail network is fragmented. Rather than having a national railroad, or tracks open to use by any company, our railroads are vertically integrated—they own, maintain, and run their own lines, and compete largely on the strengths and weaknesses of their networks.
For what that's worth, that used to be the case in many countries, it was certainly the case in most of europe before the inter-war period (e.g. the ancestor of Deutsche Bahn was created after WWI, the french SNCF in 1938, and British Railways after WWII).
And numerous traces of that remain if you know how to look. Paris has several major railway stations each serving a slice of the country (and inconveniently disconnected requiring connecting transit through the city) because each of these slices used to be handled by a different company, each with its own terminus station in Paris.
Back to the US, but an example people might not know/think of -- the NYC subway system. It's all run by the Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA) now, but originally there were separate, competing subway companies[1, 2, 3]. That's why some lines are letters, and some numbers, and why switching between these often feels surprisingly long and/or complex.
Eh, the problem is the city is now incredibly built up. New stations have to be built even deeper than before to avoid hitting building foundations and utilities.
Those earlier companies had the ability to do mostly what they wanted, including building incredibly piss-poor stations that can't withstand the test of time, while making it near impossible to renovate the station because they cut every corner possible and included no bypass tracks.
They were also able to pay peanuts to send humans into harrowing situations to get the tunnels and tracks and etc. made, collapses or flooding or other injury-inducing hells be damned.
America does build infrastructure painfully slowly and bureaucratically, but I don't think we're ever getting the early-1900s esque speed of building back at a price public entities will pay (or a price private entities could ever realisticlaly recoup). Enough rules have been written in blood to ensure that.
While there are private railway networks doing their own thing, the overall national network is operated by the JR group, which was formerly the unified JNR until it was privatized.
The companies do jointly operate though, in something that they call ‘mutual direct operation’ where they basically each agree to run trains on each others line as one continuous (to the customer) operation and split the fares.
Metro systems in Japan work a little differently. The main difference is that they're primarily real estate hedge funds owning most of the property in & near the stations, rather than just being a transport network. Their main interest is in creating economic hot spots around their stations, and it just so happens that moving people with ridiculous efficiency between those is the best way to do so.
Taking into consideration that Japan is little more than a third of a million square kilometers in land area, while the US is over 9 million square kilometers, and the vertical that would impose to railway systems to develop infrastructure similarly. Comparing transit systems from/to the US and most other countries seems to be apples and oranges.
Madrid had a similar situation with the trains stations. However all they has been connected by rail and metro. Main connection it's the train tunnels from Atocha-Recoletos-Nuevos ministerios-Chamartin and Atocha-Sol-Nuevos ministerios-Chamartin.
Atocha sinks all the train traffic that comes/goes from the spurh of Spain to Madrid. Chamartín does the same thing with the north traffic. Sol, Recoletos and Nuevos ministerios have a pivotal role, moving people from this two exterior stations to the center of Madrid.
Having more than one railway terminals for a city as big as Paris is not unreasonable. There are technical difficulty with connecting the stations as it's not easy to build lines through/beneath the city. A single reasonably sized station also may not have the capacity to handle all the passengers.
In China, most long range railway services are centrally planned (this is not necessary a bad thing here.), but Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. all end up with more than one terminal.
> Having more than one railway terminals for a city as big as Paris is not unreasonable.
> There are technical difficulty with connecting the stations
Both points of yours are right, but something is missing in the picture.
Several non-connected terminals are the right solution is you only consider the service to the people living in the city, but if such city also acts as a transportation hub for a greater region, then you must ensure that travelling via the hub be possible without having to load your luggage on a crowded bus.
all the terminals are historical. you really want trains to go through the city. in china apart from the historical stations there is usually only one new station for high speed trains. the problem in china is that the cities are huge and their high speed tracks are new and independent from the historical infrastructure so they are usually not upgrading old stations but build a new one often outside the city. the shanghai station terminates at one of the airports, which is quite reasonable.
beijing seems a bit more complicated because it looks like they actually upgraded existing stations for high speed railway, but they also built a new high speed rail station is in the south, which at first seems odd given that the airport is far away to the north and there is no direct connection (unlike some other cities), but then they built the new airport also in the south and now the placement makes a lot more sense. (still no direct connection to the airport though)
in germany at least every larger city is trying to convert terminals into through running stations. vienna just merged its two major stations into one main station in the last decade.
> in germany at least every larger city is trying to convert terminals into through running stations.
Which is a multi billion dollar effort for very questionable gain. Stuttgart 21 is an unmitigated clusterfuck. Munich is probably never going to switch - the cost alone for the two-track S-Bahn tunnel exploded to well over a dozen billion euros and will take way over a decade to complete. Should the Bahn ever think it would be desirable to convert Munich Central to a through station (if they ever find the place to do so), they'll probably need to spend over a hundred billion euros relocating everything. Frankfurt is similarly bad.
The key thing is, if railways would hire enough conductors they could reduce turnaround times in terminal stations to well under a minute - driver in the old front hops off, new driver hops on at the old end, starts up the control unit and off the train goes. But that would require them to hire and invest into staff on their own dime, while the cost for reconstruction or new construction is almost exclusively paid for with tax money. That is why terminal stations fell out of favor.
> vienna just merged its two major stations into one main station in the last decade.
It's not a complete merger, only the ÖBB moved their long-distance trains - Wien West still serves the Westbahn and regional trains.
if railways would hire enough conductors they could reduce turnaround times in terminal stations to well under a minute
but that's not the only problem. the speed at which the train can enter the station is much lower, and the distance it must travel when coming from the "wrong" direction is also longer, and outgoing and incoming trains get in each others way. these factors all increase the travel time and reduce the capacity a station can handle. the new vienna hauptbahnhof is capable of handling more trains a day on much less space than its predecessors. the rebuilding freed up a lot of real estate space too. of course the location already had the benefit of tracks going in multiple directions that could simply be reused, whereas most other terminal stations probably would have to build new tracks in the other direction or pick a different location.
It's not a complete merger, only the ÖBB moved their long-distance trains
but that is the point. there is now a single station for long distance transfers, where it matters. regional trains leaving from westbahnhof will only be used by people starting or ending in vienna. those coming from other directions will mostly be able to take a through train or transfer in maybe st. pölten or linz instead of vienna. the westbahnhof is no longer a transfer station except for destinations in vienna itself. the same for the franz-josephs-bahnhof. if you come from the south or east you transfer at hauptbahnhof and then somewhere outside vienna.
In Beijing the situation may be slightly better as all the major stations are not terminal stations (after 2015).
>>> I should had used stations instead of terminals in my original post, sorry for not native English.
I also don't think transiting between stations is particularly difficult, as in most situations there are massive transport lines (S-Bahn and U-Bahn, RER, metro...) connecting them.
for long distance travellers the mode switch is a massive hindrance. transferring from one train to another at the same station is a lot easier than having to leave the train station to enter local transport, and then transfer back to a train. that's two transfers in an unfamiliar city. it's just not practical.
in beijing getting from a long distance train on one station to one on another could easily take an hour, whereas a direct transfer if both trains are at the same station would take minutes. but that's an academic example because the chinese long distance rail system is not designed for transfers anyways. you would almost always get a direct train between major cities, unless you are going extremly far, like guangzhou to harbin. i don't remember ever having to transfer trains when traveling in china.
There was a BBC article (I think) about a guy who travels via train all over Europe and finds these odd disconnections and routes that don't make sense, take too long. Often due to a lack of cooperation between various government imaginations.
It was an interesting read, as a tourist I generally can get where I need to go, and that's no small accomplishment, but traveling otherwise seems to present more complications than I assumed.
London also, with multiple distinct stations that originally corresponded to both private train/railroad companies and also parts of the country. Even after nationalization, the "natural" geographic separation remained, which is perhaps inevitable for a national hub.
Euston: west coast line to Scotland; Kings Cross: east coast line; Paddington: west country; Waterloo: SE England. etc.
Not Chicago, but here’s a couple of related historical anecdotes about 19th century Baltimore’s similar railroad problem:
- The Baltimore Riots of 1861 occurred as northern soldiers from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had to March between Camden Station (now the baseball stadium site) and President Street station to connect to Washington DC
- President-elect Lincoln had to travel incognito and at night to avoid assassins as he had to connect between the same two stations in Baltimore on the way to his inauguration.
Baltimore was such a hotbed of civil unrest and an important strategic location that cannons were placed by the Union on Federal Hill pointed at the city within range of both railroad stations.
Railroad interconnections (gauge and ownership) have been a problem in many places since the beginning. The U.S. was (and still is in many ways) the “Wild West” of commercial development (backed in no small part by London investors), and the building of the railroads was perhaps the most crazy, frenzied, back-room corrupt development of the 19th century.
An interesting (but long) read: “Railroaded”, by Richard White.
Most countries eventually decided to merge the railway companies under a single state controlled monopoly precisely to end the wild west days.
Ofcourse the economic importance of the railroads declined when trucks and automobiles were invented so a lot of investors were happy when the government stepped in
I love this kind of stuff, now if Netflix want to make a documentary out of this, that would be amazing!
We had this sort of operation in the UK before WW2 when there were separate companies running trains and even more so pre WW1 when there were 10s/100s of companies running everything from a single short line through to main lines up and down the country.
It was, of course, very inefficient for the reasons that the OP discusses, the need to send a wagon anywhere from anywhere meant 1000s of "trip freights", although these would almost entirely have been made by trains. You also had stopping freight services that collected and set down at each station so you can imagine the shunting/marshalling was very time-intensive but, of course, in the early days, a day or 2 was still faster than most alternatives.
What happened in the 70s in the UK with Speedlink was that they realised the best way to utilise capacity was to try and create fixed freights that travelled good distances at relatively high speeds between a small number of very large yards where it could be broken down into smaller ongoing services or go onto trucks. Of course, this only suited certain customers and would not work for a small business shipping a small volume but it worked well enough that it became the standard pattern by which all freights now run in the UK. I guess the issue in the US is that the distances are so long, you don't want lots of smaller specific trains but a few much larger trains with an enormous mix of destinations.
it's worth adding that during the video you can listen to an interview with former BART Director of Media Michael C. Healy who wrote a book about BART at 10:40 for about 10 minutes and at 44:10 you can hear State Senator Scott Wiener about funding BART. there are more interviews and commentary throughout the video.
Resident conservative here - we need to nationalize the rails. Not the railroads, but the rails themselves.
The freight companies take federal money to expand the network, and the second they don't meet profit projections they tear the tracks up. They treat Amtrak like shit despite taking their money hand over fist, they have been terrible stewards of the system, and they would rather engage in the fuckery from this article than think holistically. It's a misalignment of incentives, and it's really starting to fuck us.
Nationalize the rails. It's what other sane Western countries do. The Erie and Lackawanna sold off the rails in the Lackawanna cutoff - considered at the time an engineering marvel, and capable of HSR - for scrap. That's insane, and should never have happened.
>Resident conservative here - we need to nationalize the rails.
Imagine calling yourself a conservative and supporting the idea of nationalizing the rails. Nationalization is quite possibly one of the most unconservative ideas out there.
Nuanced thought is to be commended. As a moderate conservative, I am not opposed to nationalizing the rails. Certain shared infrastructure is impractical when privately owned, primarily when (as parent points out) private ownership creates misaligned incentives.
As a fiscal conservative, my views are that we should reduce government waste. As long as Amtrak continues to be worthless, the money we spend on it is wasted. When unprofitable rail lines are torn out, the money we spent building those rail lines may have been wasted. If we genuinely want eco-friendly transportation, one option to explore is to centralize our rail infrastructure with the goal of it becoming useful to all.
I don't know if it is the best option, but I think we should explore it and see what the benefits would be.
Maybe for two different definitions of conservative. But it seems easy enough to want to conserve something that the market will destroy, and to realize that one feasible way to do that is nationalization.
Free market capitalism only works when you have free markets. Look at the cost of airline tickets post ICC. We could see something similar with freight, and will see major Amtrak gains - ideally even Brightline gains.
Good read - historically the railroads depended on a system of demurage to make money (deliberate oversimplification alert): this included three pots of money paid by the shipper, one to the originating railroad, one to the terminating railroad, and a per-mile fee to earch railroad that moved the car in between. Railroads could even specialize in different types of traffic, the NKP in the midwest was a mover of fast freights between various eastern and western systems. Many major cities would have a terminal railroad jointly owned by the larger systems who's major job was to interchange traffic between the major roads.
Demuragr was a regulated system under the ICC.Come the end of the ICC and deregulation this system changed unit traffic, whole blocks of cars or even whole trains just for a shipper, became more important then single car load demurage system. Infrastructure (tracks, yards, the physical stuff of railroading) changed to support this mainly via abandonment or spin off (the spin offs are usually called shortlines or class 3s). New stuff is rarely built but refurbishment or reconstruction of old infra is fairly common. And all that leads into the situation the article talks about.
This is also an issue with subways. NYC subway, for example, originally had two different owners and they build their separate networks with different width so that one rail would not use the other. Today, they call it Division A and B trains.
The US South had 5ft gauge during the civil war. There was a massive post-war effort to standardize the gauge that took place over a 36 hour period. All the southern railroads not already on standard gauge did so all at once from May 31-Jun 1 1886.
Tens of thousands of work crews pulled the pins of the west rail and moved it 3in inward. Simultaneously crews at rail yards modified the primary rolling stock.
Service resumed Jun 2 on standard gauge and for the first time passengers and freight could cross the boundary without a changeover stop.
It's a little more complicated in the case of the NYC Subway because the size of the tunnels and stations is based on the size of the rolling stock. BMT/IND (B Division aka the letter trains) trains simply can't be driven through IRT (A Division aka the number trains) tunnels. A "changeover" would entail widening tunnels and platforms many feet below Manhattan, not just moving a lot of rails.
Yeah that makes sense. I just thought it was really neat that the US pulled off such a massive project to standardize gauge over a single weekend - similar to Sweden switching from LHD to RHD on a single day. It's a huge coordination, organization, and training challenge. In the rail case it was done entirely on paper with a little bit of telegraph support.
that's certainly interesting. i just heard about a case in germany where a city has two different systems, and they bought new trains for one of the systems but forgot that they had stations serving both systems where those new trains didn't fit because the other system had narrower trains and wider platforms. the new trains would scrape the platform edge and take damage.
I still do not understand how local rail ends up fragmented like this. The Tokyo metropolitan area has like… what? 8 operators? You’d feel like there would be some consolidation and yet.
In NYC, the MTA runs both so they are technically consolidated, but changing car widths on a live subway system that is used by millions of people every day is on the list of very difficult problems.
For example, if you wanted to conform the IRT lines in NYC (the numbered lines + the 42nd Street Shuttle) to the BMT/IND lines, you would need to (at minimum), update every platform (to back the edge away from the train), probably update every place two tracks are parallel and too close together, probably also update some of the routing and tunnels to enable a larger turning radius, and reapprove all of the tracks (including elevated portions) to support heavier trains.
Since all of the lines (barring the 7 and S) overlap at different points, you can't just make these mutually exclusive changes to one line at a time; you would have to shut down the whole system to make the changes, eliminating service to huge areas of the city for months (if not years).
Like any public utility, there's a huge cost to get the infrastructure in place because there is... well... a CITY in the way. The immense capital outlay is generally worth it for the first to enter the market in a given area, because they stand to collect 100% of the demand for the service they offer. In contrast, a second competing entity incurs the same capital outlay, but can only count on as much of it's competitors business as it can wrest away. Unless their offering is of substantially better value, the most they can realistically hope for is 50%. In cases like local rail service, the initial outlay is so immense that there's little chance that anyone could make a compelling business case for it.
See the earlier comment, the large Japanese private railways are real estate and hospitality companies with a train side business. Each has built their own little fiefdom, but they play nice enough (thru trains, tourist passes, and regional transit payment cars) to make all the effort not worthwhile.
Although during WWII and for some years after all the lines to the south and southwest of Tokyo were under Tokyu Railways (then known as Dai Tokyu, or "Big Tokyu).
They may appreciate that competition between the operators is a mechanism to support efficiency and progress in infrastructure. Each rail operator wants people visiting their malls, building near their stations, and in working towards that, they improve their systems.
If I'm not mistaken, London also has two different types of tube trains, although in that case I don't think it'd because of different owners, but one is simply narrower and therefore cheaper to make tunnels for.
Actually it's both of those, and more complex: multiple private companies building at different times in history, using widely diverse tunnelling techniques and depths to suit different needs.
The London sub-surface and deep-level tubes were made by different technologies. Surface by cut-and-cover and deep-level by tunnelling shield. Both were the first of their kind, and deep-level wasn't possible until electric propulsion was invented. The deep-level tunnels are narrow because of the expense of digging by hand.
After I wrote this yesterday (partially) about the California Bullet Train (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36843136) I got to musing about what all that money could buy. It does relate to the topic of public/private ownership.
Amtrak already offers passenger rail from SF to LA. It takes 10 hours and uses tracks that are mainly used for freight, and much of the roadbed is single track, too narrow, and too low-quality to support 200 mph trains.
However: we're talking $100+ billion here! With that, you could buy a controlling interest in Union Pacific ($123 billion market cap), kick the freight to the side (), and fix the roadbed. It also wouldn't have to go through the San Joaquin Valley.
Freight: what to do with it? Well, with all that money, you could do something. I'm not a railroad engineer.
How much do you think that costs? Most of the costs in CAHSR are in building the 220-mph-capable track, not in acquiring new ROW for those tracks. For comparison, merely electrifying Caltrain is costing well over $2 billion. No new track, just stringing up catenary wire and installing electrical feeds. Rebuilding a single-line freight trunk into a high speed rail corridor would cost far money, and that's before considering what to do with the freight (hint: the answer is build a new line for them... and then you have to wonder why it wouldn't be simpler to build a new line for HSR and let the freight use the existing line).
It shouldn't cost anywhere near that much money, but the short answer as to why it does cost so much money is that the CA governments seem to be uniquely and disastrously incompetent at project management, on top of several other systemic cost issues in the US.
My point is that the reason it's so expensive is largely because of who's doing the work--buying out an entire company isn't going to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, nor is it likely to fix the issues making the project so ruinously expensive. It's just going to make it more expensive because you have to buy out an entire company on top of all the work you're doing at inflated costs.
> First, it's not on top of what's planned; it's instead of.
No, it's on top of. What you're proposing is to convert an existing freight rail line that is nowhere close to HSR standards (unelectrified, low speed, and single track) to HSR standards, and combining that with some sort of freight relief line (which is a new line that is unelectrified, low speed, and single track). There is no meaningful cost reduction in that process from retaining the existing freight rail line and adding a new line built to HSR standards.
You say that you are not a railway engineer. Do you have any explanation for why you think there's a cost reduction basis to buy a company, build a line to HSR standards and build a line to freight standards over not buying a company, building a line to HSR standards, and doing nothing to the existing freight line?
> Do you have any explanation for why you think there's a cost reduction
do you have any explanation for the fact that they're NOT "adding a new line built to HSR standards?" Possibly not even in the initial Merced-Bakersfield route, as I laid out in my article.
or that there is no published plan for doing it, or a credible budget? Particularly in heavily populated areas like LA and SF.
Or that going through the central Valley makes a mockery of the "two and a half hour" claim that sold the plan in the first place?
Yes. They are actually adding a new line built to HSR standards. It's incomplete, and so incomplete that it's not useful without the subsequent phases that are not yet funded. (And the high costs you are quoting are the projected costs for the full completion of the actual viable project).
There are published plans for more parts of the project. Look up the Caltrain-HSR blended stuff for more information (I don't know the plans in LA offhand, but that's partially because a lot of my sources are still salty about which pass is being used to enter LA).
Yes, CAHSR costs at least 5x what it should to build (probably going to be more like 10x when you take into account idiotic decisions). But what it will deliver will involve HSR standards of track.
I see. So you've admitted that it'll be 10x a reasonable budget, and by going through the Central Valley it can't possibly meet the 2 1/2 hour time originally quoted. I think we're done here: over-promising, under-delivering, exactly what the conventional wisdom says.
(Considering the tracks can't run in a straight line, 400 miles LA-SF is a ballpark figure. Even if the train averaged 200 mph, that'd be two hours. With stops, much more. But the projected route will be way longer than 400 miles, with more stops, and a slower average speed.)
How the project ought to be done is pretty irrelevant; how it's actually going to be done, or has been done, is all that matters.
This would more than likely turn all of California’s rail freight into road freight (or even worse, air freight). It’d probably end up being a net worsening of emissions considering how much more efficient rail freight is than trucks.
And converting a 19th century rail network into something that can support high-speed rail is no small task. You’d eliminate the land acquisition costs, but that’s about it.
It’s pretty defeatist to abandon new rail anywhere that land values are high. It’s expensive but at least you’d have something new and useful at the end of it, rather than sacrificing an excellent freight rail system and ending up with the bad balancing out the good.
All true, but I'll just keep saying: $100 billion and counting. 171 miles of track from Merced to Bakersfield in 2030, by which time it'll be $200 billion, probably.
The scale changes everything. Intuitive arguments like yours melt away.
Every railroad in the USA should be nationalized, modernized and much of it transformed into commuter railways. This article is a perfect example of the inefficiencies of mass infrastructure created by the "free market"; which was entirely created by the US government anyway.
Complaining about inefficiency and suggesting transforming most of the US's very efficient private freight rail system into nationalized passenger rail in the same comment is certainly an interesting position.
The nationalized systems seen in the EU seem to be associated in dramatically higher cost for freight transportation, not lower[1]. The reason the rail companies stopped offering passenger rail services in the US was that nearly every one of them was absolutely hemorrhaging money by the end and the only reason they'd kept them that long is because the government made them do it. Transporting people by train in most of the US is laughably inefficient and inconvenient next to the car due to the low population densities across most of the country. There's a reason nearly the entire country switched to using cars for transportation almost the instant that it became possible for them to do so.
> Transporting people by train in most of the US is laughably inefficient and inconvenient next to the car due to the low population densities across most of the country.
I get so tired of hearing this flawed argument, which places the cause and effect backwards. Ohio has the population of of Sweden, Indiana has the population of Denmark. Texas is almost twice as populous as The Netherlands, and its population is mostly confined to a triangle of urban areas that are within commuter rail distance. The Northeast Corridor is an uninterrupted urban development from Washington DC to Boston. The USA has numerous large population centers, many of which are completely unconnected by usable passenger rail despite close proximity. Over 80% of Americans live in urban areas, and most of the populations is confined to the coasts and the Midwest.
If you think trains are too inefficient, all you have to do is observe the ridiculously huge short hop flight network in the USA. There are at least 6 daily non-stop flights from Charlotte, NC to Washington, DC, which is a 6 hour drive. There are at least 30 nonstop flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which is also a 6 hour drive. There are 3 non-stop flights from LA to San Diego, which is less than 3 hours away. There are at least 10 non-stop flights form Chicago to Columbus per day, a route that has no passenger train service and under 6 hour drive time.
These short flights, which save effectively no time over high-speed train travel, exist because there is demand for non-car travel that is being unmet by the the trains that do not exist.
Switching to cars was not an inevitability, it was a not an obvious choice, we actually went out of our way to destroy existing, functional rail infrastructure and neighborhoods to replace it with interstate highways, and a lot of it was motivated by a massive automotive manufacturing lobby exerting government influence.
In the US, the automobile is also massively underpriced and subsidized as a policy choice, which pushes citizens toward choosing personal vehicles instead of alternatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbEuaCCV-zg
You may have gotten the impression that I hate trains from my comment. I don't hate trains. I hate when people try to propose trains as a solution to transit situations they are completely unsuited for.
Rail is the highest volume mass transit solution. The layout of population centers in the US at a macro and micro level leads to this level of throughput rarely being necessary when all other factors are considered.
There are indeed several locations in the US where high speed rail lines which do not exist would be a very good idea and would obviously supplant short-haul flights which currently serve those routes.
There are also many cases where commuter rail systems which don't, or barely exist would make excellent additions to the metropolitan areas around major cities.
However, this is the exception, not the rule. It is not relevant to the vast majority of origin destination pairs when traveling in the US.
Passenger rail in the US needs to answer the question "How is this tangibly better than the alternatives?". To which the answer is usually "Its not". For shorter distance trips the inconvenience of not having a car once you get to your destination usually ends up outweighing the benefits of not having to drive yourself. For longer distance trips, flying is usually going to be dramatically faster. As mentioned, there certainly are examples which fall into that sweet spot in the middle but in the US they are relatively few and far between.
My argument is that the sweet spot in the middle is incredibly common, and almost every sweet spot in the middle market is vastly underserved.
Texas triangle, Northeast Corridor (needs more speed and service frequency), Florida, California and Pacific Northwest, all need high speed service.
The problem of needing a car once you arrive locally is another correctable piece of policy failure, and that problem doesn’t stop a huge number of people from making a huge number of short hop flights in the United States.
In 2019, 44.5 million cars were rented in the US, so I think people very frequently jump on a medium to short distance flight and renting a car at their destination. Plus, we have ride sharing apps.
> However, this is the exception, not the rule. It is not relevant to the vast majority of origin destination pairs when traveling in the US.
This is I think something where I think you're in agreement with the substance, but not the wording.
If you look at a list of the MSAs in the US, the MSAs in the top 50 that aren't practically serviceable by HSR in some fashion are Seattle, Denver, Portland, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Salt Lake, New Orleans, and Birmingham. And five of those aren't entirely implausible.
So most people actually live somewhere where some form of HSR is plausible. In the Northeast and California, the problem is more that it hasn't been built yet; for the Midwest, Chicago is strong enough that it can drive HSR traffic without concomitant (and probably unlikely) planning changes in other Midwestern cities; Texas probably needs unlikely planning changes to be viable. For the Southeast, Florida would need unlikely planning changes to be viable on its own, but connecting to a strong Midwest and Northeast system via Atlanta could also be viable. Connections past that probably aren't viable (sorry, Memphis and New Orleans).
And I think you recognize that there are several strong areas in the US--I doubt your list of viable HSR routes are much different from them. I just think you're underestimating how much of the intercity traffic in the US that actually entails.
Among "the alternatives" that rail has to be better than: Busses using the existing highways. They won't be as fast as high speed rail, but they will be (in most cases) faster than non-high-speed rail, and the infrastructure costs will be massively less. Also, we can implement the plan this year, not a decade or three from now.
Busses have a bad reputation, as being ugly, uncomfortable, and smelly. So do trains, but with high speed rail, you buy some really nice trainsets. Well, for much less than the cost of rail right of way, you could buy some really nice busses.
I'm not going to comment on your broader point as I largely agree passenger trains being unsuccessful is a policy choice.
But Indiana particularly is a bad example. 1/3 of the population you mention is in Indianapolis that has tried many times to have commuter trains, the population does not want them! Even modern/modest attempts have failed[0]. If commuter trains aren't popular with the people there why would longer haul passenger rail be? Even if you could magic an Acela route between Chicago and Indianapolis into existence it would not be faster than a car or the many private bus routes that go there and you'd have to deal with the inconvenience of getting to the start and end locations in a city that has rejected public transportation.
The northern population centers which account for another 6th of the population of Indiana are already serviced by regular electric inter urban trains into Chicago, the nearest big population center. That line is seeing about 50% less usage compared to pre-Covid numbers.
So beyond just the policy choices, in Indiana at least there is strong evidence for a lack of desire for inter-urban rail.
Take San Francisco to Los Angeles, for example. Let's say you're flying. It takes an hour to get to the airport, and you have to be there two hours before your flight. The flight takes an hour. Then it takes half an hour for your baggage to arrive, then another half an hour to get your rental car, then an hour to drive to your destination (if you're lucky). That's six hours, which is the same as driving. High speed rail (real high speed rail) would be faster than flying (or driving).
But let's say you're going on vacation. Let's say you've got a wife and two kids. If you fly, you need four tickets. Same with rail. If you drive, you only drive one car. That shifts the economics massively.
> Indiana has the population of Denmark. Texas is almost twice as populous as The Netherlands
Indiana is 36,000 square miles; Denmark is 16,000 square miles. Texas is 268,000 square miles; The Netherlands is 42,000 square miles. The populations may be similar; the densities are not. That matters a great deal for this discussion.
>Switching to cars was not an inevitability, it was a not an obvious choice, we actually went out of our way to destroy existing, functional rail infrastructure and neighborhoods to replace it with interstate highways, and a lot of it was motivated by a massive automotive manufacturing lobby exerting government influence.
That is the often missed point of the movie Roger the Rabbit.
I think the article addresses most of these points: the collapse of passenger rail in the US is largely attributable to inefficient line division and competition (the "Alphabet Route" between Chicago and Baltimore, for example[1]) as well as domestic policy shifts around subsidized transit (in favor of larger subsidies for automotive manufacturers, highway construction, etc. in correspondence with subsidies for suburbanization).
Low population densities can be misleading; much of the US is highly urbanized, and dense urban centers would be very efficiently connected by rail service were we to improve it. I for one would almost certainly make more trips to cities in Ohio, Illinois, etc. if it was a < 6 hour high speed trip rather than an overnight one.
> Low population densities can be misleading; much of the US is highly urbanized, and dense urban centers would be very efficiently connected by rail service were we to improve it. I for one would almost certainly make more trips to cities in Ohio, Illinois, etc. if it was a < 6 hour high speed trip rather than an overnight one.
The contours of a successful HSR system in the US and Canada are roughly as follows:
The core linear corridors of DC-Boston (densest US population) and Detroit-Quebec City (that's 10/15 largest cities in Canada). Combine these with an east-west Boston-Toronto and north-south Montreal-NYC spine (timed interchange at Albany makes too much sense), as well as several other small feeder routes I'm not mentioning.
A Midwestern knot centered on Chicago with lines to (in ccw order) Minneapolis, St. Louis (maybe to Kansas City), Louisville (and thence to Nashville I think), Cleveland, and Detroit (not sure how to squeeze in Cincinnati and Columbus). At this point, you might consider connecting the tendrils to the northeast system as well.
CAHSR, with connections to Las Vegas and Phoenix. Texas Triangle. Maybe Portland-Vancouver.
Nashville-Miami via Atlanta, and Atlanta-DC via Research Triangle in NC.
Wow so the entire Rocky Mtn. west is just left out in the cold. What about Denver and SLC? Guess no one needs to go to AZ either?
Further I don't think you understand the cost, lot's of people out east think throwing a rail line together isn't more difficult than throw a couple of logs on the ground and some metal tracks. Let me tell you about what it is like trying to build a rail line through the west. There are mountains that make the Appalachins look mighty tiny that you've got to dynamite straight through, because you can't go up them, with the alternative being massive detours. If you want to go through the south you'll have hundreds of miles of tractless desert with temperatures being over 100 degrees on the regular, without water for miles.
> Wow so the entire Rocky Mtn. west is just left out in the cold. What about Denver and SLC? Guess no one needs to go to AZ either?
Connecting the 19th and the 46th largest city over ~400mi of mountainous terrain with no intermediate cities of note to pick up along the way is not a recipe for success.
> Further I don't think you understand the cost, lot's of people out east think throwing a rail line together isn't more difficult than throw a couple of logs on the ground and some metal tracks. Let me tell you about what it is like trying to build a rail line through the west.
That's why I didn't suggest any routes like that. The closest you get is Portland-Vancouver, which is questionable in large part because of the mountainous region (and Portland, OR is quite frankly not a large city). CAHSR does have to cross two or three mountain regions (depending on how you count), but you're connecting 40 million people in several large metropolitan areas with it, so it's actually worth it. And outside of those, I'm not connecting anything else--you're the one complaining that I'm leaving out Denver-SLC after all--so how do you think I'm ignoring the expensive costs of what I'm not proposing to connect?
Are you complaining that the west was left out of their list of viable starter routes _and_ saying that the west isn’t viable due to high construction costs caused by the mountains/environment?
First, much of the country is never going to be capable of having efficient passenger service. There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA; the distance is just way too large.
Second, passenger and freight rail just doesn't mix. A lot of European countries look at the US rail market and ask themselves "how can we move that much freight by rail?"
Third, nationalized rail has not worked out well in the US. The article here already talks about Conrail (the nationalized corpse of Penn Central) a little. But Amtrak's stewardship of the Northeast Corridor has been abysmal--here is a linear corridor about 500 miles long connecting 4 of the top 11 largest cities in the US, entirely in public hands, with no freight traffic running along it, and yet we still lack a proper 220mph high speed rail with frequent service along the corridor. US commuter rail systems generally suck even harder than that, and again, they are already all publicly owned anyways (and many of them can't even use the excuse that they rely on track owned by other people).
Finally, if you read the article and particularly some of the comments closely, you'll notice that the problem here can be boiled down in simple terms to "cost minimization in one domain creates secondary consequences that have problems elsewhere"--given the size of the US, even a nationalized system is going to have internal business unit divisions that will keep the same underlying problems. The comments give some examples of such intra-service turf wars causing solutions to not work out.
As an addendum, I assume by "entirely created by the US government," you're referring to the land grants to railroads. Well, land grants to western railroads--the eastern half was built out before they started giving out land grants. And the land grants were only given out during a short ~30 year window. I don't have the exact number on me right now, but I think it was about 40% of the US railroad mileage that was awarded land grants. Hell, one of the transcontinental lines received no land grants whatsoever.
> There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA
Not sure what you mean by this. There is already a passenger route between Chicago and LA. Has been for a long long time. It's called the Southwest Chief it runs from Union Station LA to Union Station Chicago multiple times a day.
The crux of it is "viable" though. It's viable in the same way taking a cruise ship from LA to Miami is a viable form of transportation. You can do it, it does work, but it's more something you take because of the journey than as an effective way to travel itself. I'd also be shocked if it wasn't running at a pretty substantial subsidy.
Sure, but most airports are being used. If you're subsidizing it heavily and it's still a novelty instead of a part of regular infrastructure, then it's a different story. I was checking quick, and Amtrak is claiming that the train from LA to Chicago this Friday is 100% booked, but I'm unsure how many travelers that is, and they're only running the one train that day. It also takes nearly 2 days.
I'm not against subsidizing train travel, but you should be getting something for it. You could decide to add a train between any two places and dump money into it until it's cheap enough to fill up. The question is if you're causing people to take the train who would have otherwise driven/flown, or if you're just subsidizing a new market.
I don't live in either city, but the concept of taking one of the other long-haul Amtrak lines from Chicago to Seattle has seemed interesting to me. It's not that expensive and it would be quite scenic. That said, if I took it, I'd be flying to Chicago, then taking the train, and then flying back home from Seattle. That's not replacing a flight/drive, it's creating net new flights. Is that the sort of train line that we should be subsiding the existence of? I can see the value of doing it as a matter of culture and history, but if the goal is to reduce the carbon emissions of flying and driving, it may actually be counterproductive.
It's so strange when people tell you how something is obviously impossible to have that has existed for their entire lives.
Maybe they think that trains are like planes, and that you have to stay on them for the entire Chicago-LA trip, rather than getting off (or on) at one of the 50 other stops?
Not "multiple times a day". Once per day. (That is, one departure per day in each direction. There are multiple trains en route. But if you want to leave Chicago for LA today, there's only one train you can use to do it.)
The speed on the northeast corridor probably has a lot to do with the sort of track available, no? Making high speed rail grade tracking in the US is totally unprecedented. Grade separations. Smoother and larger curves. All of this demands eminent domain. We’ve seen how expensive this land acquisition process can be in rural California. I imagine in the much more urbanized east coast such high speed rail building would be even more costly and time consuming than its been in the middle of California.
You can probably squeeze about a half an hour out of the current DC-Boston train time without spending a dime on infrastructure, simply by running trains more efficiently (especially in western Connecticut where I'd swear they're dispatching intercity trains behind the local commuter train given how pokey it goes).
Outside of that, there's probably about 100 miles of track that can support 220mph speed limits in current right-of-way (large sections in MA, MD, and RI). Adopting better trainsets (switch to EMUs from locomotive-hauled) and rebuilding track to higher speed limit standards would help there. The track from about Kingston, RI to New Rochelle, NY basically needs dedicated HSR. You can, for the most part, use the existing I-95 ROW for this, and east of New Haven, there's basically no takings you have to consider; west of New Haven, you need to do a lot more takings for curve straightening, and that is going to be an eminent domain disaster.
> There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA; the distance is just way too large.
This is like arguing that the Trans-Siberian Railway is not viable because the distance is just way too large: the Trans-Siberian Railway is not even a high-speed railway.
It’s not viable. The United States is too wealthy for passengers to waste days on a train. They’ll simply fly in 4 hours. Furthermore, that Chicago to Los Angeles train already exists and runs daily.
The Trans-Siberian railway is about being able to move things from the Asian ports in the far east to the population centers in the far west. It has everything to do with a strategic defense decision by Russia, and was commissioned in an effort to allow imperialist Russia to wage war. To compare the Trans-Siberian Railway that is primarily used for freight to a passenger line from Chicago to LA is comparing apples and oranges.
1. "Nationalized" doesn't necessarily get you "modernized". It gets your money supply controlled by Congress.
2. "Much of it transformed into commuter railways"? You seem to have no idea of how much of the US is rural. Commuter railways don't make sense in rural areas.
You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? You think the large cities which require a dense population for tax collection and often act as the hub for these transportation networks, perhaps have an incentive to fight nationalization and expansion of publicly held lands into housing developments?
Roosevelt set aside hundred of millions of acres of land not for eternal preservation, but for future development by generations that would otherwise not had land considering the industrial barons of his time would have completely demolished it.
>You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains?
Yes, considering the distributed nature of the US's population pre-dates the car. Go look at a population density map from 1900. Tons of primarily agricultural small towns spread out over an enormous area. Back then most small-ish towns in the middle of nowhere probably did actually have commercial rail because there were no other options. It's just that when the other options did appear, rail went into terminal decline because it was simply a terrible way of serving those kinds of areas when cars and trucks exist. Even today when the spread is less driven by agriculture, people still prefer lower density housing because being stuck in an apartment building sharing walls with god knows who else stops being fun really quick. People like having a bit of space of their own.This results in lower population densities as a result of people's preferences about how they would like to live. Rail is a good means of transporting high volumes from one node to another. It is good at that and it should be used in that context. It is not good if you try to shoehorn it in as a replacement for all other means of transportation as some groups seem to be inclined to do.
Look at Amtrak if you want to see a nationalized rail service. Outside of a few northeast lines, it's a complete disaster. It's hard to imagine how a national passenger network could be worse.
I must be crazy for enjoying taking the train, I've never even taken them in the northeast. The only disaster I see is that we're not building high speed lines, and that passenger trains take a backseat to anything that the oligarchs who own the lines want to run through.
What a terrible idea. Our freight rail system is the envy of the world. Why would we wreck it with government control just to serve a small number of commuters?
I want more passenger rail, but would like to pile on that the US rail network is freight in a way not seen in Europe.
When I looked at the numbers some time back, the US had something like 10x more freight rail than Europe [per capita], and Europe had [at least] 10x more passenger rail.
(I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)
> (I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)
My guess is it's scale. Chicago is the third largest city in the US, and yet it's 600 miles from any ocean-going port (the Great Lakes doesn't really count, since it's not practical to navigate for any interoceanic shipping). There's smaller cities in the interior of the US that are even further from the oceans. By contrast, in Europe, it's hard to get more than 400mi or so away from a major port.
Chicago used to ship to the coast through the Great Lakes.
The Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and that trade made both New York and Chicago what they are today. But railroads became a thing and they just built a new one that followed the same route as the canal.
You can also ship down to the Mississippi from Chicago, but again you're dependent on a canal to bridge the gap to the navigable waterways.
So instead of moving all of those good by train you'd prefer they all switch to trucks which emit far more carbon? All for your fervor dream of connecting rural counties with no population to a commuter rails system that no one would use in most of the country. If you disagree, I'd suggest you take Amtrak from St. Louis to Chicago and see how empty it actually is, you'll probably get your own car.
> I'd suggest you take Amtrak from St. Louis to Chicago and see how empty it actually is
I've taken it dozens of times. It's not even vaguely empty. Largely because the train starts in Chicago. It takes a bit to get to less full stretches.
edit: in my head I was thinking Chicago-St. Louis. The answer is actually simpler - the train is relatively empty from St. Louis to Chicago because it is the last leg of the trip. Chicago is the end of the line.
This guy is definitely more knowledgeable about railroad operations than I am, but I'll just point out that the Chicago built environment can support a few million more people than it currently has. The expansion of an in-city rail yard in an economically depressed area of the city is not a disaster, and could prove to be a catalyst (however small) to improvements, and in 20-30 years that land could be reclaimed fairly easily for urban living once they accomplish the long-term goals that the author envisions.
Yeah, I thought that the emphasis on (and assumption of) an inherent tragedy of an expanded yard detracted from what was otherwise a fascinating and pretty great article. I kept waiting to learn why this expansion was going to be so detrimental to the rail network, but I guess the author’s view is that the expansion is bad because it’s a requirement of a suboptimal network.
I was going to make the observation that once the yard has been expanded, I doubt it would ever be reclaimed for other uses, but the number of paved-over spurs and customer connections disproves that point. It makes me sad to think about the amount of literally irreplaceable infrastructure that’s been ripped up rather than retained for future freight levels or repurposed for passenger use.
>The expansion of an in-city rail yard in an economically depressed area of the city is not a disaster, and could prove to be a catalyst (however small) to improvements, and in 20-30 years that land could be reclaimed fairly easily for urban living once they accomplish the long-term goals that the author envisions.
Hello from Philadelphia, this take is so completely of touch with reality. The Reading Company, now dealing solely in movie theaters, continues to squat on land and bridges that it has not improved in half a century, yet continues to own.
While the Reading Terminal was converted into a convention center and food market, the rail yards on the waterfront are largely parking lots and vacant land. The coal yards they fed in the center city are now home to a fenced in lot full of transformers.
Expanding an in-city rail yard is not a catalyst to improvements in the city. Reclaiming former railyards is not relatively easy.
I am sure you are right about Philadelphia, but I don't think the same situation applies in Chicago. I think you are bit salty because they are wasting valuable waterfront land. You are right to be angry about it! 80% of Chicago's waterfront is public parkland; in 30 years don't be surprised if it's 90+%.
The neighborhood in question, needs investment and it needs infill. Taking 5-10 square blocks off the table helps concentrate the investment and infill, and will accelerate the improvements. Or at least that's how I see it :)
If the government mandated that rail companies sell passage on their track networks at reasonable rates and in a nondiscriminatory fashion, how much of Chicago's rail network becomes redundant? Perhaps removing this redundancy would allow Chicago to redevelop significant patches of urban real estate for residential and mixed-commercial purposes.
tracks themselves should be nationalized, just like roads are. then the government can allow any operator to use the tracks. don't get rid of redundancy, use it to increase capacity, and where practical, keep cargo and passenger tracks separate.
mixing busy cargo and passenger tracks is a bad idea, because passenger trains need to be reliable without delays in order to be attractive. cargo can handle delays better but wants to travel as fast as possible which is pretty difficult when passenger trains with their multiple stops get in the way.
so without knowing the chicago rail network, i'd claim that there is no redundancy that could be freed
Railroads sell passage at market rates. I don’t know how reasonable they are, but seemingly good enough that it is a common practice. Therefore one often sees engines from the western railroads all the way in the northeast, e.g. BNSF and UP.
For what that's worth, that used to be the case in many countries, it was certainly the case in most of europe before the inter-war period (e.g. the ancestor of Deutsche Bahn was created after WWI, the french SNCF in 1938, and British Railways after WWII).
And numerous traces of that remain if you know how to look. Paris has several major railway stations each serving a slice of the country (and inconveniently disconnected requiring connecting transit through the city) because each of these slices used to be handled by a different company, each with its own terminus station in Paris.