Posted on 03/17/2020 6:50:48 AM PDT by karpov
In the midst of Sunday's presidential debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, Biden blurted out that his campaign's high-speed rail plan would take "millions of automobiles off the road."
This is the second debate in which the former vice president brought up the belief that bullet trains will get people out of their cars. This is, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely.
Biden's campaign site calls for "the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts, unlocking new, affordable access for every American." Would bullet trains passing through major cities scattered across the U.S. actually get people out of their cars?
"The answer is no," explains Baruch Feigenbaum, assistant director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation. (Full disclosure: The Reason Foundation publishes this website.) "High-speed rail primarily takes customers from aviation. Car travel might be substitutable with inner city buses, but we don't really see it in rail. That's not why other countries have built high-speed rail."
Feigenbaum notes that countries that have built high-speed rail have typically done so to reduce crowding on existing rail lines, not as a substitute for roads. The sole exception was China, which used it as an economic development project during a time when its highway system was much less robust than America's.
"Basically, Biden loves rail," Feigenbaum says, noting the vice president's roots in the northeastern Acela corridor. Indeed, the first high-speed rail project Biden says he'll focus on is increasing the speed of trains traveling from New York City to D.C. That region is the only part of America where rail travel has been shown to be efficient and profitable. Taking that mentality and trying to stretch it across the U.S. is absurd.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
Slow Joe must be planning on appointing Willie Greene as transportation secretary.
The only Trains his VP Successor will build will end at the Reeducation Camps.
Taggart Transcontinental
They should stop calling them bullet trains though in alignment with Washington DC NBA team.
Another thing about Italy is that they use trains a lot more than we do for traveling - puts high density folks (and some animals) all together....mass transportation isn’t just an infringement on FReedom of movement, it can make bugs spread through a populace a lot faster and father.
The main high speed rail lines in Japan, China and France are profitable. Other lines aren't.
That is not entirely different from the situation here: Amtrak's Northeast Corridor service turns a profit and other lines don't.
Rail does get more government money per passenger than highways or aviation, but it's not like they aren't also subsidized in different ways.
If confined to high traffic routes, high speed rail can indeed make a profit. The problem is that countries overdo it. China is using rail development to spur the economy as we did years ago with highway construction.
High-speed rail system isn’t the answer to get millions of cars off the road just go back to street cars in large cities.
Los Angeles had a good system until tire and auto companies bribed state hacks.
Doesnt mean it would work and doesnt mean that I should pay for the friggin thing.
As a railfan, HSR is proposed in the Northeast. One of the route is from Boston, Worcester, Hartford, New Haven and New York. If you look at the rail on a map, it looks like it would be crookeder than the Hartford, Providence and Fishkill RR. Of course, the last through train on it was in 1955. Hurricane Diane helped the New Haven abandon it.
Until 2005, when Amtrak electrified the section from New Haven to Boston, the fastest train from Boston to New York was the Airline Limited - aka The Ghost Train. It ran from Boston to Willimantic to Middletown to New Haven to New York.
It won’t work. Most of the railroads are in the business of moving freight. With the exception of Amtrak, the only railroad companies who are doing freight and passengers are the Alaska Railroad and a few tourist railroads (Naugatuck Railroad is one. They have a C&D customer on their line.) Now, if you build a HSR, you’ll need to build bridges over freight railroads, which will be a lot of money. In the Northeast, the Providence & Worcester run their freight on Amtrak’s NEC at night, since the NEC is owned by Amtrak. Other places, freight takes the presidence, not passenger. If a BNSF piggyback train (containers and trailers) is late, they’ll tell Amtrak to wait.
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