Biden Says High-Speed Rail Will Get Millions of Cars Off the Road. That's Malarkey. This is what happens when you think all of America looks like the Acela corridor.

Reason ^ | March 16, 2020 | Scott Shackford

[dearolddad]

This is from the land of 150 million shot dead. In other words Joe’s deteriorating mind.

Slow Joe must be planning on appointing Willie Greene as transportation secretary.

[Kickass Conservative]

The only Trains his VP Successor will build will end at the Reeducation Camps.

[john316]

Taggart Transcontinental

[xp38]

They should stop calling them bullet trains though in alignment with Washington DC NBA team.

[trebb]

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.

[x]

The problem is even in Europe, Japan and China passenger trains are unprofitable and require government subsidies to keep running.

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.

[Vaduz]

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.

[NativeSon]

Won’t do a thing for me either. What I stated was, in places with existing infrastructure and the riders (the NE), I could see it working. Anywhere else, no.

Doesn’t mean it would work and doesn’t mean that I should pay for the friggin thing.

[Deplorable American1776]

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.

[Deplorable American1776]

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.

[Svartalfiar]

For the USA to begin working on high speed passenger rail now is actually an undertaking not really viable or affordable. It would require an entire overhaul of a system that is 80 years behind. This is a pipe dream o all pipe dreams and frankly I think we could colonize Mars with less money than to convert to high speed rail.

Not just that, but the reason it works in Europe is because of geography. Europe has a lot of mountainous areas, which aren't much fun on a family car trip. They are also long drives time-wise, to only go a short number of miles as the crow flies, making air travel less useful. To tell the truth, though, air travel within Europe is generally not too expensive. But these distances are short enough that rail is fast enough and easy enough compared to plane time plus Euro-TSA time.

These US, however, have long, flat drives that are generally either something where a couple hour car ride is easy enough, or for longer travel, a train is not going to be any kind of time savings over air travel. Most HSR has a max speed of around 200mph. A dedicated, straight tunnel from CA to VA, with no stops and minimal turns/grades (so little slowing) is going to be 13+ hours.

So a real HSR will have a minimum of 10 stops along the way (probably waaay more), would zigzag to hit more major cities along the trip, and isn't just gonna go straight through mountain ranges. And, is it gonna be completely isolated from the freight/regular lines? So now we're looking at a 2-day trip (3?), when a plane will get you there in five hours.

The only places HSR would make sense would be connecting cities that are too far for a quick road trip, but too close for a flight to be a better option than HSR. And of course, they need dedicated lines with no cross-traffic. STL-Chicago-Detroit-Indy. Nashville-ATL-Charlotte. Dallas-San Antone-Houston-Austin. Vegas-Phoenix-LA-San Diego. Seattle-Portland-Vancouver. DC-NY-Philly-Pitts.

But what company is gonna be willing to do this? It should definitely NOT be a gov boondoggle, but the extreme costs to the lack of return doesn't really make this feasible, methinks. Unless you get a billionaire (Bloomie!) willing to spend too much money, and not care that he'll never get a full return in his lifetime.