High Speed Trains

[Lamb]

I see a lot of posts on social media about high speed trains in Europe...comparing it to the US where were don't have that. But there is a good reason for it, our country is huge.

Do you think we'll have high speed trains in the next 10 years traveling cross country?

 

[tango]

I see a lot of posts on social media about high speed trains in Europe...comparing it to the US where were don't have that. But there is a good reason for it, our country is huge.

Do you think we'll have high speed trains in the next 10 years traveling cross country?

Europe is also pretty big.

The only way I can see high speed trains making any sense is to connect very specific population centers. The eternal trouble with public transport is that it doesn't take me from where I am to where I want to be, it either runs between very specific points (meaning I have to get from my start point to a hub, and from a hub to my end point), or it stops regularly making it very slow.

If you want to get from near a hub to near another hub it can work very well. It just doesn't help much if you have to make two or three changes and then walk the last two miles. Fast trains might work well between, say, NYC and LA with a few stops in between. It's hard to see how they'd be of any use at all around much of rural America.

Overall it seems the American people would rather fly somewhere in four hours than spend eight hours on a train. It's easy to see why, especially if the train imposes luggage restrictions much like the airline does and maybe doesn't offer any more access, or perhaps even less luggage security, than the airline. I've never been one to just leave my luggage somewhere out of sight and hope I don't get to my destination to find some other passenger took it somewhere along the line.

 

[Forgiven1]

Traveling by train in the US would have to be totally overhauled. What we have doesn't really work well and it limited to where you can go. If I had the opportunity to travel by HSR, I would. It would require a huge expansion of the rail system and would take longer than 10 years. The idea of some cities wanting to put some in between them is a great start.

 

[Castle Church]

HSR is not really intended for long distances. Yes there are some people that take a series of high speed trains from Madrid to London, but they are rare, and it is not a single seat on one train. HSR is really a point to point short-medium distance solution. Routes where a flight is 1-3 hours are perfect for HSR. In the USA think routes like the cities in the North East and North West, California, Texas, and Florida. Places where there are large cities that can be connected via rail compared to driving 1-5 hours or flying 2-4.

Brightline has shown that a Florida network is viable both in terms of construction and cost to run. In the next few years Tampa will be connected to Miami via Orlando, which is fantastic.

HSR does not make sense to take from LA to New York, that would take too long and cost as much as flying. Even in China you can take a HSR train from Beijing to Hong Kong, but it is really aimed at connecting the intermediate cities that are also large cities.

 

[tango]

There's no reason why you shouldn't travel by train between places a great distance apart, it just needs to offer a benefit when compared to flying or driving. If you've got the option between spending two hours in an airport waiting for the TSA agent to poke and prod at everything in sight, spending another eight hours on the plane crammed into a tiny space, and then have to wait for your bag to finally show up on the conveyor, maybe it is worth taking longer to sit on a train, not have to deal with the TSA, have a space big enough that you can stretch your legs a bit, read, maybe do some work or take a nap, and then carry your bag off with you rather than waiting for it to show up while hoping it didn't find its way to Bangkok or something.

The eternal question is what it offers when compared to other solutions. If it costs more and is less convenient people won't use it.

I often think about transport when it comes to a situation like visiting friends of ours. It takes about 10 hours to drive from our house to theirs. We could fly it, but it would be 30 minutes to the airport, an hour or so for check-in and security, probably 2-3 hours in the air assuming no delays, then an hour to drive from the airport to their house. And we'd need to rent a car, or we'd be totally dependent on them driving us everywhere. So we'd save about five hours flying compared to driving, but we'd be limited in what we could take and we'd be subjected to changing rules in airports, the tiny seats on planes, delays, and extra costs every which way.