231–240 of 316 posts
But not much more, and it makes me so sad that we undervalue real public transportation here. I wish we could do better.
Still! This is something! And this website is cool!
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This is also a problem with IIRC the Acela and other Amtrak routes between Boston and New York, and probably on other routes too.
Amtrak owns most (all?) of the NEC track between New York and Boston. Most other routes are freight train owned and Amtrak has issues. Though the freights claim the issue is Amtrak is late for their assigned times and once that happens they lose priority, if Amtrak was on time they claim that they would let Amtrak through on time. (one fright that doesn't let Amtrak through on time will cascade to being late for all…
If you want to see the real Railways of North America, check out these interactive maps [1]
Wow, I don't know why I thought there would be... Way, way more trains active at a given time. I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.
The data is available and open!
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Air travel is 2% of global CO2 emissions. Making air travel carbon neutral (by capturing carbon) would increase ticket prices by around 20%. That would be much cheaper than switching from planes to high speed rail. I'm not saying that countries with lots of rail are wrong. I'm saying that passenger high speed rail doesn't make sense in the US (at least, not outside of the northeast). We're too spread out.
I’m not an expert on this, but China seems huge and also spread out, and they have much better HSR coverage than basically anyone else. Air travel is a problem when it comes to emissions because there really aren’t any viable alternatives, where as you could pretty much sub in nuclear + renewables for anything else energy/transportation wise and the math makes sense after a large investment. Knocking overland air tra…
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My understanding is that the freight trains now are really long, and there's few places to pull off the tracks for such long trains, so the timetables are really tight for when trains can pass each other. This goes to what I was talking about in my initial post. Right now, part of why Amtrak is bad in the US is because we're getting pretty efficient use of the same rails for freight purposes. The ways around this wou…
Passengers and freight have different constraints and so don't mix well on rail. We should build separate rail for each. Make them compatible rail but that is for emergencies you can mix not normal operations. (2am maintenance windows count as a good reason to mix) Don't be fooled by population density, the western states and Alaska have a lot of nothing and bring the density down. You can find overlays of France and…
We're past the era where we could just put a highway or rail line through the poorest neighborhood of minorities we can find, pay them all $10 for their land, and pretend it's a net good for the country. Without some truly insane government intervention that is both unlikely to happen, and probably shouldn't happen, I don't see how we'd add a full new rail system.
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Obviously it’s not the first credible foray into HSR in the US-that honor is Acelas. Edit: if you’re referring to Brightline West, construction hasn’t even started.
Acela isn't HSR, and Metroliner which came before had travel times from NYC to DC as low as 2.5 hours. Acela does the same trip in 3.5 hours. Metroliner lowered trip times primarily through faster acceleration.
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That doesn't mean it's fast
It is though. On a trip earlier this year I clocked at it almost 150mph via GPS. That's HSR by any definition.
Acela is like a Formula 1 car that gets to do one quick lap on a nice racetrack, then has to take another course through bumper-to-bumper traffic for the rest of the race.
It shows the sad state of the public train system in the US. For comparison, here is a similar map for the UK: https://www.map.signalbox.io/
When I look at the map for UK I see far fewer trains than the map for the US. Am I missing something? I thought maybe it was because you posted earlier in the day, but your comment was posted around 0100 UTC--not that long ago. I do not think we have the best public rail system in the US but if all o had to go on was how many trains there were on each map I might think differently.
Anyway, according to [1,2]: US: Ridership 549,631,632 UK: Ridership 1.738 billion
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_Uni... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Great_Britai...