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How far can you go by train in 5h?

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Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#151

Post by ghaff »

asdajksah2123 wrote: post #111
aj7 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People’s time is too valuable when per capita GDP is $60k.

And that's why they prefer a mode of transport that requires you to drive an hour outside the city in traffic, arrive at least an hour before your flight so you can go through the indignity of airport security, take an hour long flight, and then wait for bags and then drive an hour back into your destination city in traffic? Total time 4 hrs. Or they prefer driving through traffic from one city to the other for 4.5 h…

That does assume you live conveniently to the train station in Boston or the suburban station to the south. I do generally take the train to NYC but mostly because I hate driving into NYC so much. I have to drive an hour in the wrong direction to get to Route 128 so the time tradeoff actually isn't great.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#152

Post by xenocratus »

OJFord wrote: post #34
maeln wrote: post #18

You can really see the Paris-centric approach in France: From Paris you can reach almost any other major city in 4h, but on the other hand, all the other metropolis can barely reach 1/4th of the other major population center in 4h. Compare this to Germany where almost any major metropolis can reach 80% of the country in 4h ...

Infamously similar in the UK, even despite being smaller. Particularly East-West travel anywhere much North of London. Many inter-city routes are via London. (I'm not complaining, j'habite à Londres ;))

> anywhere much North of London

You don't need to go that much North - I used to live in Oxfordshire, trying to get to Cambridge for work was a joke (I don't drive). It would take 3.5h+ for a 140km journey from Oxford to Cambridge because train journeys were only through London (+ a railway station change), and there was only one coach that stopped in every town along the way (and which has been axed into two separate legs since the pandemic, making it 4h+ now).

In the end I moved to London, so that's manageable now...

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#153

Post by solar-ice »

geraldwhen wrote: post #103
CPLX wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any answer to this has to involve two staples of American culture, cars and racism. The prevalence of both has been a big detriment to rail initiatives. For whatever reason people have associated a nearby train station with crime and opening up the neighborhood to the "wrong people". And the incredibly cheap and ubiquitous car culture (especially in the post-war period) provided the alternative. That of cours…

I used to walk past a bus station to lunch most weekdays. Nearly every single day I witnessed an assault at the bus station. Mass transit hubs do bring crime. Why minimize that?

They just… don’t, elsewhere. That’s not a normal state of affairs. Something is horribly wrong with how you’re doing something - either with the stations, or with society - if that’s the case.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#154

Post by andjd »

qalmakka wrote: post #22

As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically…

The USA has a world-class _Freight_ rail network, and almost all existing track in the country is owned by the freight operators, who manage the track to optimize it for freight operations. In many cases, they are openly hostile to passenger service on their tracks.

On top of this, most cities in the USA were built (or destroyed and rebuilt) for private cars being the primary mode of transportation. In Europe, one of the benefits of taking the train over an airplane is that the train stations will often be in a walkable city center with a good connection to public transit. In the USA, outside of a handful of older cities (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston . . .), the train station drops you off in the middle of nowhere, usually with far less connections and services than the airport has. When compared to air travel, intercity rail travel is often slower, less convenient, less frequent, and more expensive.

Even with the Acela/northwest corridor, flights are often cheaper than rail, so it is the convenience of the downtown stations and connections to public transit that drive people to take the train over airplanes. It's no coincidence that the major cities on the route (DC, Philiadelphia, NYC, Boston) are also cities with some of the best metro networks in the country.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#155

Post by madcaptenor »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #137
madcaptenor wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See for example Alon Levy's map of proposed HSR for the Eastern United States: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/02/10/high-speed-rai... They've actually done serious investigation of what's viable given typical costs and ridership of high-speed lines elsewhere in the world. The high-speed bits they propose are basically a Boston-Atlanta-Chicago triangle with some ornaments (Chicago - KC, Chicago - Minneapolis,…

It doesn’t make sense to connect Portland and SF, but there’s a lot of value to be gained in connecting Portland and Vancouver BC, and San Diego to SF/possibly Sacramento. We would definitely want to have a “constellation” of networks rather than one interconnected system given the geography of the US, and that’s fine. There’s never going to be a time when it makes more sense to travel from LA to NYC by rail instead…

Right. You don't want a line down the entire West Coast, even though it's tempting to draw. But a line from Vancouver to Portland makes sense, as does a "greater California" system - roughly lines from Los Angeles to SF, Sacramento, Vegas, San Diego. The latter is basically the California HSR system that's under construction, plus the proposed privately built line from LA to Vegas. (Levy also proposes LA to Phoenix; Phoenix is further than Vegas but also bigger, so maybe it makes sense.)

Even in the east there are some gaps. It's obvious that a midwestern network centered on Chicago and a southeastern network centered on Atlanta make sense, but it's a bit more of a stretch to connect those to the northeast.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#156

Post by madcaptenor »

tcmart14 wrote: post #90
melling wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we agree we should only build where it makes sense. 1000 miles is quite far. That would be 5-6 hours! - NYC - Miami 1300 miles - NYC - Chicago 800 miles Then we have these: - NYC - Philly 92 miles - NYC - DC 225 miles - NYC - Boston 215 miles - NYC - Portland, ME 325 miles - NYC - Pittsburgh 380 miles - NYC - Cleveland 470 miles - Cleveland - Chicago 350 miles - St. Louis - Chicago 320 miles - Houston - Dallas 2…

Maybe I am misunderstanding some of the intent. But yes, a rail from NYC to Miami is far, but when you chunk it up, it makes sense. For a NYC-Miami, you could have stops in Philadelphia, DC/Baltimore, Richmond, Raleigh/Durham, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Orlando. It would really depend on the route. Like a NYC-Portland OR or Seattle, you can make some pretty good stops from NYC to Chicago, but once you get pa…

The thing about NYC-Miami is that north of DC the population is along the coast but south of it the population is inland. A route via Charlotte and Atlanta probably pencils out better than one via Charleston and Savannah.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#159

Post by marcolussetti »

darkwater wrote: post #42
maeln wrote: post #18

You can really see the Paris-centric approach in France: From Paris you can reach almost any other major city in 4h, but on the other hand, all the other metropolis can barely reach 1/4th of the other major population center in 4h. Compare this to Germany where almost any major metropolis can reach 80% of the country in 4h ...

Or Spain with Madrid-centric approach.

At least Madrid is roughly in the center of the Peninsula, whereas London is quite a bit off that.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#160

Post by DrBazza »

melling wrote: post #98
DrBazza wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced high speed rail would ever work in the US due to how entrenched the car culture is, regardless of the terrain. In Europe with we have spoke-and-hub railways - want to get into London? There's almost certainly a local station near you in the suburbs. Then jump on the Eurostar to Paris. Get to Paris, and then get a local line back out to wherever you want to go. Right now, it would have to be airport…

Would never work because of our car culture? I’m going to use my imagination on this one since “never” is a long time. The year 2040. Two technologies combine make never a reality. 1. Maglev trains that travel at 350 miles per hour (600kph) 2. Self-driving taxis Exhibit 1: https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/china-fastest-maglev-train-in... NY to LA in 10 hours by maglev sometime in this century. The 4 hour maglev between…

I did sort of contradict myself there and say never and multi-decade plan.

Problems the US has:

* Lack of spoke and hub railways.

* Cars.

* Cost-per-mile, which if I understand correctly is a political and a union-thing.

* And just politics by itself.

It's not dissimilar in the UK, but somehow we muddle through it. I don't believe that "cheap" maglev will ever help the US, it's been around for decades, and the longest highspeed line built by the Chinese is 19 miles at a cost of "only" $1.3 bn (I'll leave it up to the reader about how realistic that construction cost would be in the West).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#China,_2000-present

The US will still have the same problem huge construction costs, political lobbying from the airlines, no hub and spoke railways, a vast airport style set of car parking around any terminals that are built.

The West now suffers from pointless adversarial politics where the opposition votes the opposite to the government simply "because", and for no rational reason other than "it's the other party". Even once you get past that hurdle, it's how "cheap" is the cheapest bidder. Labour/labor laws and so on.

I would genuinely love to see the US lead the world with high speed rail, but I just can't see it.

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