Many of the arguments heard on here, pro and con. Interesting that for California HSR, Trump is opposition and in TX, Biden was blamed.
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The problems are 3 fold for HSR in this nation. First off except for the NEC most major over 1 million population cities are spread out way to far for HSR to work in this nation. 2nd is the steep costs to go from scratch California has spent an estimated 30 billion dollars and has yet to lay a mile of track Texas hasnât even gotten past the environmental studies yet. 3rd the fact that passenger rail never makes a profit and would require massive amounts of substantial government subsidies for little gain. Weâve got bigger problems in infrastructure that need solved before we dump trillions into HSR.
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I would suggest you look at a decent map with a gazeteer. You will see how far from the truth that statement is.
In the Thursday Trib: âChicago posts 7th largest population increase in nation, part of a growth spurt that also lifted many suburbs.â
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Whenever Amtrak decides to launch the Avelia Liberty I donât think we will have High Speed rail for a while since Brightline is also taking their time on the West Cost side of things
The NEC might need updating though for the new Availa train sets
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Iâm not talking metropolitan areas Iâm talking about cities themselves. Chicago and the metropolitan areas around it has lets see here PACE METRA CTA for mass transit to move people around HSR isnât going to mean a hill of beans within a 100 mile radius which gets you to Joliet Rockford Milwaukee all the suburbs of Chicago.
The closest city besides Milwaukee which is inside efficient true HSR range is Columbus Ohio then followed up with Indianapolis and Omaha Nebraska their larger than Detroit and St Louis and Kansas City. Not exactly hotbeds for HSR services.
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Efficient range is dependent on speed. Generally 500 miles is more than competitive with air travel in terms of total journey time.
Perhaps you are anti-HSR because of preference for upgrades to the infrastructure your business uses for free - highways - and has been invested in for the past 60 years.
The Interstate Highway System was originally estimated to cost $25 billion over 12 years, but the final cost was significantly higher, reaching approximately $114 billion. In todayâs dollars, this translates to over $500 billion.
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The problem with HSR is different from PRIIA-style HrSR (125mph sustained peak) which is what is most suitable to most traditional corridors.
HSR requires city pairs reasonably far apart, with suitable real traffic between them to justify the capital expense. Stops âin betweenâ have to be reasonably far apart, too, and at âcentroidâ locations served by good (and quick!) regional transport â the logic of Metropark, and Lorton, and Sanford, and Rotterdam. If the gain of high speed is frittered away (as we often argue is the case for regional jet aircraft) there is increasingly little point in the vast additional expense of true (LGV) HSR track construction vs. sensible grade-separated TLM with PRIIA suspension and negative-canât-deficiency tilt.
If we hadnât sent China $37-trillion-plus to build out their domestic HSR system, we wouldnât have seen what happens when things get built out as a priority regardless of opportunity cost. What is clear is that without VERY deep pockets willing to be emptied for only dubious return (or synergy with other development) â and without careful and extensive PUD development around the actual HSR stops â there is little point in duplicating any sort of ânational networkâ at sustained high speed. Assuredly building it as a sort of regional-rail or modern interurban system is just as âunlikely to thriveâ now as it was in the 1920s.
The point was raised about Avelia Liberty sets finally running in the NEC. I donât think anything has changed for the better since Joe wrote that letter years ago â the trains would only reach HSR speeds in fits and starts (New Brunswick to Trenton and a few miles north of New Haven, substantially the same places Acelas could go 159mph or better) and any meaningful âsecond spineâ efforts are over 40 years out and tens, probably hundreds of billions shy. The new Acela trains wonât have much better to run over during their entire prospective service life, and I continue to argue that some of the billions spent on them would have been better spent on better service and amenities for people using the Corridor.
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Not really correct my friend. HSR to Detroit would have a stop in Ann Arbor and possibly one more in the metro area. Same would be true for NW suburban Indy and Columbus. Minneapolis would also stop St Paul and maybe SE suburban St Paul. Probably also true NE of St Louis, KC and Omaha.
Brightline is including three stops in the LA metro area. Iâm willing to bet Romney money that Brightline will be a success. Any takers?
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Besides the NEC there are areas like Florida California Texas and the Midwest that have similar population density to France. Which pioneered modern 300 km/h HSR.
Paris and Chicago are nearly the same in terms of both city and metro population.
Lyon Lille Marseille Bordeaux Toulouse all are similar in size to Detroit Minneapolis St Louis Indy Columbus. In between both areas are just all farmland.
Watch a TGV cab ride video. Just miles after miles after miles of farmland. France is called the Wyoming of Europe.
Woke: We didnât âsendâ China or Vietnam the money to build infrastructure as though it were a gift. Our capitalist system using the free market did that by importing products Americans chose to purchase. And BTW if we hadnât wasted approximately $13 trillion on senseless wars just since 2000, we could have built a lot of infrastructure right here.
I think the US problem is that everything and anything has to make a monetary profit. High-speed rail done right can minimize or eliminate the number of short-haul flights. Frankreit has banned flights on routes that offer an alternative with less than 2.5 hour travel times.
The profit here lies in climate protection and the EU countries are committed to this.
With a climate denier as president, this does not seem to be a viable option at the moment.
But that doesnât seem to me to be the only obstacle. Too often I have read participants on forums asking why they should support the Gateway Project in NY with their taxes when they personally do not benefit directly from it and are therefore against it.
Many of those people who donât want to spend money for services they say they wonât use are not telling the whole story. Many of them send children to public schools
They may pay some property taxes but they forget there are many folks paying those big taxes with no children in schools. Those complainers seem to forget we all live allegedly in a commonwealth with a temporary interruption while the super rich get another trillion dollar plus tax cut.
Another benefit of electrified HSR and adjacent HrSR tracks could be faster freight services that would get a lot polluting trucks ,(at distances over 300-300 miles off the roads
We tend to forget the full costs to society of many of our endeavors
If the route from Chicago to Minneapolis were done properly, it would find a way to include Madison the #2 city in Wisconsin.
It has to, to be practical.
The only question I have is whether or not the actual HSR line has to go by way of Madison, or whether a âstubâ connection north to a more direct Chicago-Milwaukee-Twin Cities route is more effective. That seems to me to be the likeliest solution for intermediate 110mph HrSR short-term improvement which would then support regional rail for the full HSR service.
I donât really support HSR that would serve the capital at Madison, but not Milwaukee.
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It could, and in my opinion there are track systems that could preserve HSR geometry under intermodal traffic. The first problem is that a HSR line is basically a one-speed railway operationally, and freight of any kind would have to be operated more similarly to the European way, none of the increased cost of which most rail shippers have been willing to pay. This problem also extends over to HrSR running on any kind of service frequency, albeit at more conservative speed, and youâd need much better intermodal transfer and cross-dock execution to avoid âconfusion and delayâ
I doubt weâll see a world in which PSR freight and HrSR freely coexist with the main passenger traffic on punctuated or parallel LGV. I know we wonât see one that has electrified freight, HrSR, and HSR on three separate networks, although Iâd love to see it done.
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The major complaint is that the people through or around whom the âenhanced infrastructureâ passes have a 24/7 problem with noise, obstruction, and other quality-of-life concerns with only very periodic, expensive trips to justify it for them. One of the things blocking Gateway when it was still an actual HSR project was a neighborhood in New Jersey that was seeing interminable construction â their local representative laid out the issues, including residual concerns after construction had finished.
Itâs all well and good to bring up âbut the trains benefit so manyâ â but absent some suicidal thing like CAHSR guaranteeing the train rates will be held artificially cheap while talking out of the other side of their mouths that taxpayers wonât be saddled with the construction expense, very few people in areas of suburban New Jersey are going to be shelling out for rich menâs trains to go a few minutes faster.
The current kludged excuse for Gateway, while helping out the state that dragged tail in the East River tunnels and the two states that repeatedly dropped the ball on North River Tunnel rehab, is a bit less ridiculous. But it still echoes who rides the higher-speed Amtrak trains vs. who has to live around or near them. Just as with the elevated railroads past tenements in Manhattan, not everyone is a railfan, and even genuine âgreater good for a greater numberâ wouldnât bring back rebuilding them today.
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And probably Milwaukee too.
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Walmart and all the other companies peddling Chinese goods sent it there, willingly, as profit to Chinese manufacturing and distribution. Nobody twisted Americaâs arm to send it there; few Americans are worse off for having Chinese products as alternatives.
But there is nothing like that as a âcheap moneyâ source that could be dedicated to building out a coherent network of domestic HSR lines, and I can almost guarantee that if an even halfway-Keynesian government were involved with that as a potential priority, they would direct the resources elsewhere (establishing an infrastructure of GSHP HVAC conversions, for example, far more climate bang for the buck).
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300km/h and high axle loads are not compatible per nearly all HSR railroads worldwide. As far as I know only Italy and Germany attempted to run freight on their semi HSRs lines; Italy at 250 and Germany at 250-280. Italy abandoned that completely. And newer lines are built for 300+. Germany still tries on their 250-280 lines but they never tried it on their 300+ lines. I canât recall any 300+ lines worldwide that allow more than 17 ton axle loads. Typical freight can be up to 2x that.
High axle loads deform the track. Even at low speed. I recall Amtrak saying that after putting in a new interlocking on the NEC it took just one mile-long freight train at 50 mph to knock the alignment off by a 1/4 inch.
Certainly still safe but now a rough ride.
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When it comes to HSR - every locality wants it to stop at their place. Station stops are the slowest of LSR and defeat HSR.
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