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?
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.
[1]https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s12544-013-00...