So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing.
The US is the world's largest economy and should be the shining example of amazing infrastructure, high-tech, green cities, and forward thinking policies. California is an especially egregious example in terms of infrastructure investment:
If California was a country it would be the world's fifth largest economy. It has a number of large and successful cities and areas connected along the coastline. San Diego, Orange County, LA, San Francisco. Why on earth isn't there a high speed rail between these cities? Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins? LA to San Fran in an hour and a half?
I took the train once from Irvine to Los Angeles and felt I had gone back in time to 1980. This in one of the richest counties in the world (OC). It's unthinkable in the year 2019, that we are all stuck on roads like I5 and 405, stuck in traffic for hours trying to make it to LA and the alternative is an ancient train trundling along at 50mph.
I hate the fact that an autocratic and repulsive Government is showing up the US in terms of green tech investment and high tech public transport systems, while the US govt is dropping taxes for the biggest companies and lowering spending on infrastructure and public works. This is guaranteed to have a terrible knock on effect over the next 20 years while the US is stuck with an old fashioned and clogged up transit system, polluted cities, and a dependence on fossil fuels.
I agree with your sentiments overall, so don't take my "it's not all gloom and doom" comment as a disagreement... But there are people out there trying! The project from Texas Central Railways is looking like a sooner bet than California's line, for a number of reasons. An example of a reason is lower price, stemming from geography. The route doesn't require building tunnels through mountains and the like.
Although even then there are some disappointing Catch-22 processes at work. A State Senator is using the existence of a particular court case to try and delay/prevent funding, and the plaintiffs of a court case using the Senator's opposition (which cites their case) as an argument in favor of their case.
Nonetheless, I'm optimistic on the Dallas to Houston high speed rail. In my dreams, I see that project's completion as giving California a dose of motivation, so as not to be second fiddle to Texas.
I travel from Dallas to Houston every week for work and have been following this closely. Often after a run of crummy trips by air due to delays and other common air travel issues I take an executive charter bus just to take a break. All the while dreaming of what it would be like transiting via maglev at 1kmph
> I hate the fact that an autocratic and repulsive Government
The Chinese government is much more autocratic yet it obviously does a much better job in building infrastructure
The problem with the US government is lobbyism. It does not work for itself, it does not work for the people, it works for big corporations and lawyers.
I also think that the people with influence, money and power have created a parallel world that almost has no overlap with the world most other people live in. They live in different areas, go to different schools, have different doctors or can afford the billing insanity in health care, have different career opportunities, don’t use the same air travel, have their incomes rise all the time. They probably really think that things are going great so why invest in or improve infrastructure and pay taxes?
The problem is that during the last major American infrastructure buildout, the Interstates, experts basically rammed through projects without considering local impacts or local objections, and highways ended up gutting a lot of the neighborhoods (often poor or minority ones) that they went through.
Eventually the pendulum swung in the other direction and people gained the ability to stop urban freeways, but now the pendulum has swung too far and people will sue projects out of existence.
China's land rights (or lack thereof) are not uncontroversial, and I would be surprised if they don't become a flashpoint in the future.
Chinese government is much more autocratic yet... building infrastructure
Here’s my hypothesis: when it comes to infrastructure, the operative word is not yet, it’s therefore. Autocrats have a much easier time cutting through any red tape put up by those lower on the food chain than them.
In a democratic society, such as the US, there are countless stakeholders who need to be included in the process for huge infrastructure projects like this. Unfortunately, too many chefs spoil the broth as they say.
I've heard that whereas American politicians are mostly lawyers, Chinese politicians are mostly engineers. If true, that would partly explain why they get a lot more done.
Another factor may be that the US has elections every 4 year. There is no long-term planning happening, because who knows what's happening in 4 years. Too much energy is spent on political campaigns, destroying your opponent and getting re-elected.
One of the problems may actually be rights. The US government generally has more respect for individual rights and property rights. This leads to increased safety regulations, work restrictions, and the property rights make it difficult to purchase the land and negotiate the permits necessary for large infrastructure projects.
China is much more willing to force people out of their homes for the greater good. It will be interesting to see which prevails.
>The Chinese government is much more autocratic yet it obviously does a much better job in building infrastructure
I think that a big reason for this is that the US already has a half-working solution in place. Some infrastructure already exists that fulfills this role. China, on the other hand, didn't have much of an alternative in place, thus it was easier to find the will to build it.
We saw the same thing with internet connectivity and government services in Eastern Europe. Governments built much more modern infrastructures and offered more modern services because they weren't burdened by the past.
China is a communist country, one impact being that the government owns all property. For example, individuals lease/rent their homes but the terra firma is the peoples'.
If the Chinese government wants to put a train line where houses, farms, or offices used to be, they do it. One, because they already own the land. And two, the faster goods and services can move, the faster the economy can grow.
Not an advocate for socialist/communist capitalism, but this is one area where central planning can move a little faster than the west. One are the west can vastly improve is permit streamlining.
In democratic countries we need some way of overriding individual rights for the collective good once in a while, but then the problem is that governments inevitably seem to get drunk on the power and start abusing it.
The alternative to being stuck in traffic for hours is flying.
A major problem with train systems in the United States (and this is both short and long haul) is that almost the entire country is sprawl - built around the automobile.
In dense environments (China and the north-east coast of the US (which has Acela), it's great to take a train into the core -- you beat traffic and are near your destination.
In sprawling environments (like most of CA), the benefit of ending up in the core is so much less (possibly even negative). Lower probability you are near your destination. And if you need to drive, now you are in a much worse situation (higher car rental prices due to high land values, you are stuck in traffic trying to leave the urban core, etc.).
In other words, even if you had a train, most individuals still will prefer driving (you have a car with you) or flying (faster than trains) -- killing the ROI on building the train in the first place.
> A major problem with train systems in the United States (and this is both short and long haul) is that almost the entire country is sprawl - built around the automobile.
this is an excuse i have repeated myself, but it is just that, an excuse. have you actually been to china? i have never seen such sprawl. shanghai is massive and sprawling. but yet, they (china) have extremely efficient and unbelievably cheap trains and subways. also, i have never seen a cleaner subway than what i saw in shanghai.
and this excuse doesn't even account for regions like the northeast. the amtrak from boston to new york takes four hours at its absolute fastest and costs couple hundred dollars. this is unbelievably sad. in china, the same ride would take about 1.5 hours and cost around $20 for business class (in u.s. terms, as in china, it's called first class).
Flying easily adds 1-3 hours to the trip just for bullshit and boarding and stuff so there is a certain distance where the high speed trains are faster.
It's also way more comfortable and relaxed. I prefer train over driving when I'm going somewhere too.. well until I discovered lane assist functions in modern cars that is :)
But I can't yet work while driving so I guess the train wins in overall productivity.
Flying is also a massive hit to the environment so I try to minimise it. So far I've avoided three roundtrips with planes and driven my car instead, but I've had to fly twice when going Oslo->Helsinki->Oslo.. I should probably have driven there too but for this instance time was of the essence.
It's not sprawl, it's that the United States, and by extension Canada, have extensive freight rail systems but almost zero exclusively passenger rail networks.
In Europe and Asia these networks are generally separated.
The American model means that passenger trains need to be built to freight-train safety standards, that a passenger car must be engineered to "survive" a potential collision with a freight train, since that is a possibility.
American passenger trains don't own their right-of-way, and freight companies really don't care about high-speed anything since their business model doesn't require it.
> killing the ROI on building the train in the first place
In Seattle the light rail was pressured to serve the poor communities. Once built, they belatedly discovered that a transit station causes gentrification around it, pushing out the longtime residents. So they've tried zoning to prevent development around the transit station, which then reduces the ROI on the system.
Interesting, from https://www.amtrak.com/acela-train:
"Superior comfort, upscale amenities and polished professional service at speeds up to 150 mph, Acela offers hourly service downtown to downtown during peak morning and afternoon rush hours between New York, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other intermediate cities, as well as many convenient round-trips between New York and Boston."
If I wanted to take a trip to LA there is no way I would spend a day driving each way on the I5. So for me it’s either fly or take a train. Regardless of the sprawl within metro areas, there is absolutely a need for connections between big cities - the last mile transit for airports is still bad anyway
> Jerry Brown tried to build the CA bullet train 4 decades ago.
Amusing to me he did the Rip Van Winkle and popped up as Governor again after 30 years. In office he pushed hard to get CHSR built. Every time California's high speed rails come up on HN it's obvious that everyone here hates the idea. So the US is getting what it's collectively asking for and deserves here.
I’m under the impression that the US public want cars not trains and even the current tech celebrity’s vision is to have self driving cars that work together as if they are train carriages and go in a tunnel as if they are metro train carriages.
In the rest of the world, people are fine with ride sharing.
People want cars not trains because current trains are such an awful experience. This wouldn't necessarily be the case if trains were improved to the standards of some other countries.
I understand this for inside a city, using a car is more pleas sent then sharing a bus or metro with strangers but when you travel a long distance you use a plane so all the comfort is gone, it would be better to have a high speed train , you still share it with strangers but if you are rich you can afford better accommodations including beds, you can walk and stretch your legs and there may even be spots for smokers. Maybe the average person travels only a few times with a plane so he can endure it.
The simple truth is, transportation projects are not created to solve problems but instead of pay off political affiliates, be they donors, family members, political parties, or the unions. Democrats have no more interest in high speed rail or energy independence than Republicans and for the same reason. Oh they will pay lip service saying otherwise but you can see the results of all those years they have made their claims and promises.
The elected and appointed officials of both parties serve their parties first. The party is more important than any one elected official and certainly more important than the voters.
high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world. the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless. In an authoritarian state like China the state can tell people were to live which makes it far easier to put services where those people are. Let alone the one item ignored is that much of the population does not travel long distance and that holds true for many countries. So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do and it makes a great jobs program and political payday as well
> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world.
This isn't true. High speed rail is alive and well in Europe. Geography, politics and history are all significant factors that you can't explain so easily.
> the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless
Highly speculative. Nothing beats rail for capacity to move a lot of people around quickly.
> advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless
It makes a lot more sense to have a self driving car drive you to the high speed rail station, and then drive you from the train station to your final destination. Self driving cars don't run at 160+ mph, but high speed rail does.
> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel
Yes, the 'bygone days' of maglev trains. I don't know if you've ever travelled in Japan or China but the convenience and comfort of high speed rail easily surpasses flying. And in many cases, so does the speed.
In most normal countries, rail is critical transport infrastructure. It's not a conspiracy.
What makes (high-speed or normal-speed) rail a success is a population density. A train moves a lot of people, that's its point. For it to work, these people need to work close to it, and move along it often.
Passenger railways make sense in places where one metropolis is close to another, and to yet another, etc, with suburbs commuting to these cities, too. This is what you see in Europe like Germany / Netherlands / France, this is what you see in central Japan, this is what you see in coastal China; all these places have very high population density, It works to an extent in US Northeast. All these places have dense and working passenger railways.
But they are a major investment that needs to be repaid, so they need a lot of use. I don't think I'd pay twice as much to get from NYC to Philadelphia twice as fast (say, 45 minutes instead of 90-100), and even 4 times as fast (say, 20 minutes). It would cost comparable to hiring an small airplane already, because there's no such a mass daily ridership. And most places in the US are much lower density. Airplanes are more economical over large sparse spaces.
> the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless.
Fully autonomous self driving cars are decades away[0] - assuming 15-20 years that about 20% of one's lifetime, developing rail is only a few years effort.
I do not understand how electric cars would doom rail.
> air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world
And it has the problem of a massive carbon footprint to go along with it. If we are serious about combatting climate change, we need to find ways to move as people with as much throughput and convenience as airplanes today without burning as much fossil fuel.
Given that electric commercial flight is a way off, high speed electric trains are an existing technology to achieve that.
> Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins?
Yeah I can: approximately nothing. What exactly would you do with such a train? Neither LA nor San Diego have meaningful downtowns or local transit, so you'd still need a 45 minute drive on each end to get from/to where ever you're actually going. It's a 2.5 hour drive door-to-door today, so now you've just got a three-seat journey where there was once a one-seat trip, to maybe shave 30 minutes off journey time.
Moreover, there's no technology that could build such a train. LA to to San Diego is 200 kilometers. It would almost certainly need to make stops like Anaheim, Irvine, Oceanside, etc.. Oh, by the way, there's a mountain range between the two. Even state-of-the-art HSR would struggle to maintain 200 km/hour over the entire route. So now your train ride is an hour, and you've actually saved no time.
Yes they can tell people to move in the name of public development. But it’s not like they just kick people out without compensation. My wife’s grandparents’ and parents’ had to move. The government provided them with new housing. The new houses are more modern, with toilets and running water, which they didn’t have before. The new houses are located in better places. Oh, and they have houseS now — previously they only had 1. Their standard of living improved.
>Infrastructure is easy (and cheap) when you don't have to respect property rights or do environmental impact studies.
Is there no national/public interest exception in the constitution just for such cases? Where you take someone land buy you pay or give equivalent land back(I know some people would like to get rich quick in this situations)
It is incredibly hard to get things done in a fully functioning democracy. Ask us Indians and we know how difficult it has been for us to build any large scale project. First time a road building project was outsourced to private contractors was in 1995. People who wanted to use the road were asked to pay a fee (toll). There was an outcry from media, other political parties. That government lost power and only came back into to power 20 years later and no other big projects happened until then. Right now in Mumbai, one of the densest urban clusterfuck on the face of planet is resisting a rail project which will elevating pains for 5 million people everyday, saving enormous amount of carbon, reduce pollution. And all the resistance in for cutting down 2700 trees, most of which will be transplanted.
See in Australia how difficult it has been to build a high speed rail between Melbourne - Sydney one of the busiest domestic route in the world.
Edit - I dont mean to imply democracies are bad. It is just that things are hard to get done.
Currently living in California, and I feel the main opposition to things like this are the constituents.
Everyone in the Central Valley will simply vote against whatever California wants to spend money on unless if overwhelmingly benefits them, or “hurts” those in the cities.
I know this isn’t the only reason the high speed rail project was canned, but those in the Centra Valley opposed it unless it connected some stretches like Fresno <-> Bakersfield together.
Been in New York City for the last ten years, so I certainly understand where you’re coming from. A few points:
1. Corporate income taxes don’t generate much revenue, and the revenue they do bring in is even smaller relative to the amount of harm and economic distortion it causes. It really only carries on because it’s a useful political football and because having it appeals to a certain sense of “fairness.” There’s really no correlation between corporate taxation and infrastructure, and we might even be better off without the former altogether.
2. The US does spend a lot every year on infrastructure, but it gets relatively little bang for its buck, especially in comparison to places like China; even other advanced economies (France, UK, etc.) seem to be better at controlling costs for these types of projects.
3. We also spend a ton of money every year on precisely the wrong type of infrastructure. The Federal government, in addition to every state and local government, spends enormous sums every year on not only maintaining existing roads, but also widening, adding lanes, or even building new ones. In fact I remember reading that something like one out of every two dollars spent on roads goes to build new ones, even as people decry that the government isn’t adequately maintaining the roads that already exist. That’s insane - but it’s tied up in how funds are allocated, cost sharing agreements, etc. that often comes out of Congress. In short, the Feds will pick up an enormous proportion of the tab for building new state and local roads, but contribute very little to maintaining them. It should be easy to see, then, that building new roads is often more lucrative for contractors, politicians, governments, etc. than simply maintaining what they already have.
4. All the money we just talked about spending on roads is money that was not spent on upgrading sewers, water, power, public services, and everything else that help support denser urban areas like New York. So in effect, we are starving economically vibrant cities like NY of federal funds at the same time we subsidize the continued expansion of suburbia, none of which have the density required to make massive investments in things like railroads anywhere close to economically viable.
>I hate the fact that an autocratic and repulsive Government is showing up the US
I hate that you use this term. Every government is like a flawed human being. I see it as a spectrum but HN sees it as The USA way or the HighWay.
The autocracy and maintenance of that autocracy is exactly how the Chinese government can show up the US. A centralized government with no ulterior profit agenda is exactly the central pillar to make unbiased decisions without resistance.
> while the US govt is dropping taxes for the biggest companies
California has no shortage of funding for the transit. The failed bullet connection had more funding then the system in China that carries 10x people. Stop blaming "evil corporations" for failures of local and State governments.
As a former rail fan, I’ve gotten over it. We don’t build infrastructure because we don’t value it. Not just in a “we don’t want to spend the money”—but we don’t want to make the political compromises necessary to make it easy to build infrastructure.
Dropping taxes on companies has nothing to do with it. Many European countries have lower corporate taxes than we do, and no OECD country raises significant revenue from corporate taxes. It’s a red herring and a distraction. The issue is we have a political system that makes infrastructure enormously more expensive and hard to build than in Europe (much less China). In Maryland, people are lobbying to get light rail stations torn down that have already been built! The average time spent in “environmental review” for a government project is 5 years, and its really just an opportunity for a small minority to hold up and delay infrastructure projects. But that system is a reflection of our values. We don’t build things because we would rather prioritize other values.
That is what it is. We are good at other things! We’re good at things like Silicon Valley, that don’t require centralized cooperation and people falling in line. Lots of countries have the political discipline to build rail. But there is no other Silicon Valley! (What more needs to be said about why California doesn’t have rail, beyond noting that the state’s most significant industry is based in the suburbs/exurbs of an otherwise second tier city?)
"So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing."
"If California was a country"
You (US) are now segueing into the introspective phase of Empire - that's when you learn a few lessons. When you realise that deploying more (aircraft)carriers than everyone else combined is simply a thing or spending way more on cough defence than anyone else is a thing as well, and it isn't as important as some other things.
Anyway, I hope your journey from Irvine to Los Angeles was at least comfortable.
> So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing.
The US is a country of checks and balances. Viewed differently, it's easy to obstruct changes. On average this works well, as it's far more likely for any random change to be bad rather than good. The unfortunate side effect is that many good changes don't happen, because it's so difficult to overcome all the "checks and balances".
In an authoritarian regime, changes edicted from the top encounter very little opposition. In post-Mao China, lots of these changes were wise, but not all. In the majority of the authoritarian regimes though the story is a bit less rosy.
Can we have our cake (checks and balances) and eat it too (more good changes get done) ? That's a tough question, I personally don't have the answer. But it seems more likely that once China builds a larger network of high-speed rail, the US would get some type of competitive impulse, and start investing in this too. One can only hope ...
The presenter and quite a few commenters seem to have a built-in bias towards rail. Don't get me wrong. I love a good train journey and prefer it to flying when it's competitive. But the video tries to be an optimistic take on what a cold eye could only describe as totally mad and dysfunctional government.
The situation according to the video can be summed up like this:
• China has built tons of high speed rail very fast, this is amazing!
• But they do it because their internal airlines suck incredibly badly.
• There are only three carriers, none of which are budget. Planes are on time only about 65% of the time, which is a staggeringly low figure. The cause is enormous congestion in the air leading to air traffic control frequently denying takeoff rights.
• This bizarre situation occurs because the Chinese Army controls almost all the airspace above China and refuses to let civilian flights anywhere except a few corridors.
• Rather than get the army under control and open up flying to competition, China decided to build tons of railways instead.
• These railways are all heavily subsidised. Theoretically some in the east are profitable, but this is more than offset by railways built along totally unviable routes. For one route the ticket sales don't even cover the cost of electricity, let alone construction debt.
• Because HSR requires long straight lines without sharp curves, HSR railway stations are often as far away from city centres as airports are (France has this problem too). That eliminates one major advantage of rail over flying.
The Chinese taxpayer is forced to pay for these economically insane projects because it's all a part of Beijing's control (or oppression) of Xinjiang and Tibet.
For vague and to me inexplicable reasons, Beijing thinks building expensive and slow railway lines between outer region cities that don't have much travel demand will somehow prevent rebellions. The logic of this is not elaborated in the video, but it's hard not to assume the railways are intended for future military use if there's a need to move lots of troops into these regions.
Now let's compare this to America, which according to Hacker News consensus is some terrible backwater in comparison.
America has perhaps the world's best domestic airline network. Competition is intense, prices are low, travel times are very low, planes travel freely in huge quantities and the airlines are (sorta) profitable without taxpayer subsidies.
America also has an extensive and heavily used railway network, but it's used for freight rather than passengers. This makes sense for all kinds of physical and economic reasons.
HSR doesn't really exist in America, but this isn't because American society is dysfunctional. It's because the massive subsidies and land clearance required are hard to justify when you have an excellent flight network, which operates just fine. Take away "suppress rebellion" and "the military causes 40% of flights to be delayed" as motivating reasons and suddenly the US decisions don't look so bad. Those checks and balances seem to be working out pretty well.
It‘s worth noting that new is not necessarily better. Maglev is extremely rare because standard high speed rail can boost existing rail services; for example, TGV trains use the legacy rail network to reach Nice. With a maglev rail system anywhere that isn‘t directly connected requires a transfer.
I hear you. I lived in SoCal for many years and fought the traffic on all those routes you mentioned. When I came back from trips to countries with working mass transit the awareness was even greater.
But I think it's a hard problem in the U.S. Autocratic governments just decide to do something and plow over anyone who gets in their way. The country I live in now is actually starting to lay track for a high speed rail system to connect the centrally located capital and major outlying cities, and all the way to the northern and southern borders. It did take a while to get started, because everyone had to decide how the contracts would be divided up among their cronies and how the kickbacks would be paid. But it is getting done, because if anyone stands in the way the government declares a threat to the security of the country and sends in the soldiers.
From what I remember reading, the train infrastructure in the East would never survive here in the States because our urban and rural layout structures are fundamentally different, meaning there are some large scale construction projects that are not feasibly profitable here, likewise in the East.
Hearing this make me quite proud of the UK. Even though we have old Victorian-era infrastructure we still manage to run a decent intercity train system that can get you from Scotland to London in 4 hours or so. Much more pleasant than travelling by plane without the hassle of airport security.
Yes, you even managed to build Crossrail, which is a huge project by European standards. It shows that even within a city of so expensive property, if there is a will, proper infrastructure can be built.
infrastructure literally and figuratively underlays parts of society.
Boston has infrastructure problems to a degree Seattle doesn't experience because when the Seattle core burned to the ground, it was rebuilt in some critical areas with newer infrastructure and thinking.
If you were a Bostonian or Chicagoan in that era, you were patting yourself on the back because your town hadn't burned in 20 years, and would not again. Today Seattle residence scratch their heads at some of the problems that Chicago and Boston have.
Similarly, residents of Tokyo were 'forced' into cellphones because even the 'burbs were so dense that installing new data lines was hugely expensive. 2-4 times the cost of a cellphone for a year. We were sucking down DSL+ speeds and looking jealously at their cool phones.
> Similarly, residents of Tokyo were 'forced' into cellphones because even the 'burbs were so dense that installing new data lines was hugely expensive
And yet now Japan has a nationwide FTTH grid to the point where the telco has discontinued new ADSL signups.
No need to get glossy eyed over China. Yes, there are advantages to a totalitarian regime where the population isn’t allowed to own land. There are also modern day concentration camps and mass organ harvesting.
Unfortunately you don’t really get one without tending to get the other.
Almost any European country has, with a much smaller economy, better social wellbeing/coverage and a better high speed rail infrastructure (perhaps with the exception of the UK, unless they commit to HS2) so I'm not sure the comparison you should be making is China.
You don't need a totalitarian regime to get modern infrastructure. That's just a ridiculous statement.
Few years back there were stories about officials removing graveyards to give way for industrial developments. It's really easy to get things done when one only need to answer to above, not below.
I've tried to dig for references, but it's very difficult to find discussions 2+ years back, let along official news.
There was a time in the west when we build the infrastructure we watch decaying today. I don't think we had totalitarian regimes, concentration camps and involuntary organ harvesting back then.
The USA's rail system is shit because of lack of investment, and misaligned incentives. It's cheaper to fly, or drive, than to invest in rail, even though rail is very efficient (and i suspect, more environmentally friendly than either of the above).
Japan has great high speed rail, without cutting corners and even with much weaker eminent domain powers. There are other factors at play here. Why is building rail infrastructure 5x more expensive in the US than it is in continental Europe?
If either of these things were actually the factors blocking high speed rail in the US, Europe wouldn’t have trains either. Eminent domain exists, and US infrastructure only feels old because we never spend money on it.
The US doesn’t really have problems cutting corners when it comes to safety and pollution as well. For safety, look at the standard US power outlet and compare its safety with practically any other outlet in the world, of which all of them are considerably safer (albeit at the expense of being more complex and/or larger). For pollution, look at the current US Government actions.
> Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week
My understanding is in China the government owns all the land to begin with, you lease it from them. But I guess in this case it would be "your lease is terminated, thanks"
I understand why there is no high speed rail. I can jump on a plane and get there in 1 hr for about $50-75 each way. I also have a choice of 3 different airports around the bay and similar options in LA. San Diego is just another 15 min by air.
>Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins? LA to San Fran in an hour and a half?
well, that train railway and its stops and other infrastructure would have to be build over somebody's lands/homes - the somebody's lives would have to be significantly impacted against their will. "The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few"? Especially that in practice those "Many" are frequently just some other, more influential, "Few".
>an autocratic and repulsive Government
that is a one [brutally] efficient way to outweigh the needs of the few ...
> So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing.
What would be really depressing would be getting stuck with the hidden bill for this stuff. Sentiment like yours is why politicians can dangle the carrot of rail in front of the public for decades and keep cashing out.
It's just not that great a choice of transport on most legs in the U.S; and most places where medium- and high-speed rail makes sense in the U.S. already have it, at some price that keeps it somewhat occupied.
I get that rail could be a lot better in the US, but I took a journey there by rail and was really impressed. Clean, prompt and easy.
My benchmark is New Zealand so keep that in mind.
I think the surprisingly simple bottom line is: Infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive (are you willing to pay 10'000 for every ride?) and the upside NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE to gauge.
Sure, I voted for the California high speed rail... mostly because I expected to move after a few years and not have to pay for it.. but even when I voted for it, I knew it was going to be a cluster...
What a bunch of BS. Communism is not team play. It's slavery and tyranny. The US has more team play than most places because people are free to pick their teams.
The US has had a money hoarding problem for the last three to five decades.
You're not going to get very many high cost infrastructure problems solved when the government doesn't force the issue. Socialism is a red herring, the real greatest enemy of capitalism is the unregulated free market.
That't not an excuse. You can build infrastructure without violating peoples rights. It may be more difficult but definitely doable. Look at Japan or Europe. This is a political issue based on a missing long term agenda.
What? The US has the ability to repossess land under Eminent Domain, and it can raise taxes to pay for construction labor (a roundabout way of compelling people to labor for the government). That's not the issue here.
If your Federal Reserve stopping adding nonsense imputed and hedonic values to the tune of about ~$7 trillion to your economy's GDP, you would find yourself in second place.
Which might make help explain away your confusion :)
I am so glad California did not spend $80+ billion on the high-speed SF to LA rail project. It makes no sense. Flying from SF to LA would be faster than the train. Driving isn't that bad either and once you get to LA you need a car to get around. If you really want to take the train to LA there is already a beautiful route on Amtrak along the coast.
Take the Paris-Lyon TGV. For about 30$ minimum price, you get from city center to city center, 300 miles away in 2 hours.
There are trains every 30 minutes.
I did that Amtrak route (Coastal Starlight) recently and it just took so long. I'd rather take a bus next time. I won't be doing either, though -- I'll just fly. It costs the same anyways.
> I took the train once from Irvine to Los Angeles and felt I had gone back in time to 1980. This in one of the richest counties in the world (OC)
Have you considered that richness is not measured correctly? Since GDP is effectively consumption, the more a person consumes, the richer a country is. A thousand people driving 5 hours between LA and SF will make the country richer. Not the people, which China appears to be wanting to do.
My father in law can fly from Los Angeles to San Jose in an hour for $150 round trip. Not sure why we need to lay tracks all over the land when we have flying machines.
Not clear yet if this is the early stage of a global trend, and even it it is, it may take a long time to have an effect in the US, where there are fewer good alternatives.
I haven't looked at the particulars for this project, but typically the practical limit of high speed rail is 300-500 miles. Beyond that, it's cheaper and greener to fly.
If you aren't concerned with cheap or green, and want to focus on fast... Then high speed rail might be a better option until the TSA is involved.
Even the us high speed rail Association claims efficiency only up to ~1000 mile trips, and this is their own best case marketing claims. And they're fighting for the sub 125mph version using existing ROW.
This paper shows only about a 3% to 20% improvement in co2 per passenger mile by shifting air traffic to already existing hsr in Europe (200-800km trips, taking into account embedded energy, and assuming %50 will be recyclable, which I think is quite optimistic)
I’m not sure if it’s just lost in translation, but Wuhan to Guangzhou isn’t even 1000 km so I don’t know where they get the 2200 km they’re quoting. That’s likely a figure for GZ to Beijing.
I have used the high speed line between Wuhan and GZ (and through to HK) several times. It’s currently a 4.5 hour direct journey (once per day) or a 5 hour journey if you change at GZ or Shenzhen. The HSR is 300ish km/h at the moment and that route stops about 4-5 times along the way, off memory.
Aside, I also don’t know how much benefit 1000 km/h travel would bring. That’s an enormous energy requirement to accelerate up to such a speed only to stop 4-5 times along the way. 600 km/h would likely be much more realistic, because if you shorten the duration too much you run into the wall of needing to accel/decel constantly to make the stops.
Lastly, the HSR there is already capable of 350 km/h at least, but they limited it to 300 km/h after a massive derailment that caused a heap of fatalities years ago and never increased it back up again. It may be reading into it too much, but it may also be telling that they didn’t see the benefit of upping the top speed again even when considering the loss of face.
That's the big one. What HSR needs is not even higher top speed but some control breakthrough that allows much higher train frequencies in order to cut down on stops via more trains that can serve more specialized connections (e.g. the local/through etc). No idea what that breakthrough might be, perhaps something as crazy as rocket-assisted emergency braking.
If you go from Shanghai to Suzhou via HSR a train goes roughly every 15 minutes. Most trains going east go through Suzhou (since it is a major hub) and it is roughly 30 minutes away which is a decent distance so worth stopping for. The train only gets to maximum speed for about 15 minutes in the middle.
Why not aero braking? You could install little flaps actuated with hydraulics along the train. This could probably be part of the normal braking system. The amount of drag produced by something like this at 1000kmh would likely be very substantial.
Would be cool to make a system where the train could drop off tailing cars and redirect them to stops, and pick up new cars which are accelerated to a matched speed and then linked, removing need for the train to fully decelerate at intermediate stops.
I think 1000 km/h travel would bring HUGE benefits.
State-of-the-art high-speed trains at 350 km/h tend to waste less time than planes for distances shorter than about 1000 km if you include the time it takes to get to the airport, check-in, go through security, and all that nonsense. Beyond 1000 km journeys, planes tend to be more time-saving.
1000 km/h is about the cruising speed of an aircraft so if it were possible to achieve that with a train, it would no longer make sense to take planes for the same journey -- which would be HUGE plus for comfort for, say, trips between Europe and Asia. Imagine for a 10-hour journey that you could walk around freely, enjoy massive amounts of legroom, enjoy the views of Siberia, sleep in peace and quiet, dine at a dining table, and not have to be strapped into a seat all the time. For high-volume routes it is also likely to be lower-carbon in the long run than air travel, and at the very least, can be powered on something more sustainable and less polluting than jet fuel. The bulk of your environmental impact would come from laying the track itself, so it would have to be a route of extremely high tourism or business importance, e.g. Shenzhen-Shanghai-Beijing-Moscow-Warsaw-Frankfurt-Paris-London or some such. Or Los Angeles to New York.
The article says that for 1000 km/h they would be using vacumn tubes. With vacumn tubes there's no air resistance and theoretically no need to continue adding power once you're at speed.
There are currently 61 high-speed trains from Wuhan to Guangzhou on most days (although to different stations in Guangzhou). The fastest one is now just under 4 hours.
Not fundamentally more efficient, UNLESS in a Hyperloop-like vacuum tube (as this one is). Let’s consider at near sea level.
At near sea level, the drag at those speeds is absolutely brutal. Airplanes win, although they’re harder to electrify.
If you extrapolate current Maglev designs to 1000km/h, for energy consumption per passenger mile is about 0.5kWh/(passenger-mile).
Airplanes are on the order of 100mpg/passenger, or 0.33kWh/(passenger-mile) even with the relatively low conversion of chemical energy to mechanical in a jet engine. An electric aircraft could get about 0.1-0.2kWh/(passenger-mile) with the same airframe if the battery chemistry is appropriate for that flight length. Improve the airframe, and <0.05kWh/(passenger-mile) is possible.
Length of electric flight is limited, but 1000km is possible with current chemistries. America’s near-term HSR routes are on the order of 500km, so electric flight is feasible.
This is why “Hyperloop” (or vacuum trains generally) are and were a good idea at the high end for high speed rail, in spite of all the mocking that Elon Musk incurred for the idea (which he/SpaceX popularized and funded student competitions for, although the idea is an old one). Otherwise airplanes win on efficiency.
The problem with planes is that they have to carry all their fuel/energy and to carry it costs more fuel/energy.
Most high-speed trains don't carry all their fuel with them. They get it from the network.
This will all change as battery technology improves but at the moment I cannot see it getting better trains.
That being said I expect that the 1000km/h speed will be like the Shanghai to Beijing track that got up to maximum speed a few times for the record and has since been reduced to make it more economical.
Even if this does happen and the train reaches 1,000 for a single trip and then drops back to a safer and more profitable speed of 600km/h or 800km/h it is still faster than what we have now and is a massive improvement.
American here. Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.
A lot of executives and politicians take the train between DC and NYC/Boston. The reason they do it is because the trains in the NE Corridor don't suck. This whole thing is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: build crappy trains, people hate them. Build nice ones, people like them.
This is a common misconception. Overall US transit riders earn about the same as drivers. In metro areas like Chicago, SFBA, or Washington DC, the median income of transit users is significantly higher than drivers.
>Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.
I disagree. This is a chicken-or-egg problem. Nobody is inherently against public transit. Having commuted in a few cities in North America, it's far more comfortable than sitting in traffic. If you have a good system, i think people would use it. The GO Train in the Greater Toronto Area is a good example; it's filled to the brim with white-collar city workers.
Speak for yourself. In Chicago, we've got the metra [0] which goes to the far out suburbs (L goes to close ones [1]) and there are plenty of upper class people that ride it for their daily commute.
Other, and actually main, reason is that good public transport decreases cost of land, it is basically designed to do so: it makes more places liveable/jobs reachable, so there is effectively more land for the same amount of people. So everyone will vote against or they lose their pensions.
Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.
More and better public transport in EU? For same reasons: less democracy and less market economy. More government-owner land, larger fraction of renters who just want cheaper rents (and public transport gives it to them), and they vote in the right direction, less legal opportunities for NIMBYsm.
You can gauge the insincerity of the project by the mendacity of the title. There is an area of Texas known universally as "Central Texas". The "Texas Central" project goes nowhere near it.
It's a rail line from Houston to Dallas. It's not going to happen, unless the legislature goes full bore socialize-the-losses and subsidizes it.
NIMBYs would block any of the eminent domain needed to build it. Not to mention infrastructure construction in this country is rife with corruption and incompetence. This results in HSR having massive price tags and taxpayers not wanting to foot the bill.
I assume there are already tracks between the major cities, probably used today mostly for materials and not people, so can't you put a new track near the existing one, this land would already have low value since trains are already passing there.
About 25 years ago in Jr High school we watched a brief propaganda video about maglev trains touting The Future. Corny music coupled with bold narration. It was as comical and sad then as America's progress on high speed rail since then.
1,000km/h is within what is conventionally considered transonic (965-1235km/h). I wonder how practical these speeds are without a containing tunnel, particularly on the ground where there is potential for damage to buildings, structures, wildlife, etc. from sonic booms. Additionally, as I understand it, reflecting objects and terrain at ground level increase the potential for generation of sonic booms at transonic speeds. Indeed, sonic booms are generated by trains today when going through tunnels where the air ahead of the train is constrained and compressed.
I'm not sure it's strictly necessary to have the tunnel be low pressure. It's nice for the sake of less resistance, but the speed of sound is actually lower at lower pressures, and so would more readily produce a sonic boom.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t necessarily that big of an issue for China. A lot of their HSR is grade-separated and not infrequently up on viaducts. It’s not a particularly big step in my mind to enclosing that.
Has anyone else here ridden the maglev in Shanghai out of the airport? My 2c is that it was awesomely fast and convenient.
BUT, I was a little unnerved by how much the train jostled at some points. It was like the supports for the track had sunk in some places leading to the tracks no longer being aligned.
Not really informed by anything concrete, but I think there’s a disaster waiting to happen there. China has nowhere near the safety culture I’m used to in the states.
Now the conventional cars of the Shanghai metro? I really with the west coast of the US had infrastructure like that!
From the Boeing 747 MAX incidents you can conclude that if there is a big pile of money involved then safety is a problem to be workaround of, though funny enough there are still people that blame the cause on the safety regulations, like if the regulations were not present then Boeing and the free market (with only 2 competitors) would solve the issues
I rode it ten years ago and it felt safe, I would be interested to know how safety would be for a 1000 mile trip where every inch of track couldn’t be controlled. An animal on the track, sabotage, ice, snow — there are a lot of factors that become very hard to control at those speeds and distances.
Rode it last year and it was fine. But i’m used to rail high-speed trains, so maybe that’s why i found it perfectly quiet and safe.
Another reason could be that it wasn’t the time of the day when it goes up to max speed ( it only reaches 400km/h on certain time of the day, some days only. other time it’s just 350 or something like that)
Land and labour get taken from plenty of Americans too— it's just usually for the benefit of wealthy private corporations rather than to advance a public good such as dignified, quality, low carbon mass transportation.
Not quite true, in China the government usually tries to compensate you fairly for your house and cannot "force" you to leave (although I'm sure it happens).
Please go to China and talk to people with no rights but lots and lots of dough because their land/houses got confiscated by the commies in order to build high rises, freeways, high-speed train tracks or whatever the Nazi government has conjured up. They are literally the envy of the young generation because they no longer have to work (that IMHO is indeed a problem). But alas they don't have rights whereas homeless people in San Francisco can defecate freely and indulge themselves in needles basking in the democratic sun.
Make no mistake I'm a staunch supporter of democracy and freedom and despise the fact that China is lacking in both probably as much as you do. But please get your facts straight and refrain from using your imagination to comment on a country you most likely have never been to.
I used Google maps in the past days to marvel about Beijing’s new airport, Daxing. If you look closely you see the train tracks that are being built southbound. You see that they are mostly straight, mostly on stilts (still being built) but further south they also cross through some towns - where lines of houses have been removed. You can see several camps along the route, probably for construction workers to live directly by the construction site (some farmland had to go for that) - judging from the number of buildings it must be 1000s of them. Then, close to the end, you see massive construction work for what seems to become a major transportation hub, similar to the express train stations in Xi’an (8 million people) or Shanghai Hongqiao (220000 passengers/day). Yet, there isn’t much around it - a few smaller towns and villages. A bit further south the tracks seem to end north of the city of Xiong. The first trains are scheduled to be run in 2 years.
It’s a glimpse of the next project in preparation: the megacity of Xiong’an, which is to be built until 2050 to complement Beijing and Tianjin, totalling an area of about 110 million people.
Im not sure anyone read this article through. It states an experimental 200km stretch of fullsize vacuum tubing is to be built by Hubei to validate low air resistance travel to 600/1000kph. The competition is the US/Germany and the build out will be in the next 10 years. So we are talking about hyperloops here..
A quick search shows hyperloop tt has 320m of 4m tubes and possibly by now a 1km section strung up on pylons for completion by end 2019 (in france).
Chinas maglev was a seimens tech transfer circa 2002, siemens / thyssenkrup disbanded their maglev company in 2008 after the munich line plan was abandoned.
So no one is interested in conventional maglevs, the cost per mile i imagine is not worth it. If you make it 1k kph however and reduce airport build spends this cost may change drastically.
If you can get your superconducter cooling sorted.
Readit News
The US is the world's largest economy and should be the shining example of amazing infrastructure, high-tech, green cities, and forward thinking policies. California is an especially egregious example in terms of infrastructure investment:
If California was a country it would be the world's fifth largest economy. It has a number of large and successful cities and areas connected along the coastline. San Diego, Orange County, LA, San Francisco. Why on earth isn't there a high speed rail between these cities? Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins? LA to San Fran in an hour and a half?
I took the train once from Irvine to Los Angeles and felt I had gone back in time to 1980. This in one of the richest counties in the world (OC). It's unthinkable in the year 2019, that we are all stuck on roads like I5 and 405, stuck in traffic for hours trying to make it to LA and the alternative is an ancient train trundling along at 50mph.
I hate the fact that an autocratic and repulsive Government is showing up the US in terms of green tech investment and high tech public transport systems, while the US govt is dropping taxes for the biggest companies and lowering spending on infrastructure and public works. This is guaranteed to have a terrible knock on effect over the next 20 years while the US is stuck with an old fashioned and clogged up transit system, polluted cities, and a dependence on fossil fuels.
Although even then there are some disappointing Catch-22 processes at work. A State Senator is using the existence of a particular court case to try and delay/prevent funding, and the plaintiffs of a court case using the Senator's opposition (which cites their case) as an argument in favor of their case.
Nonetheless, I'm optimistic on the Dallas to Houston high speed rail. In my dreams, I see that project's completion as giving California a dose of motivation, so as not to be second fiddle to Texas.
-Me 8 years ago
Also the new route is a joke. The high speed rail was originally supposed to run from Dallas to San Antonio, and Austin to Houston.
The Chinese government is much more autocratic yet it obviously does a much better job in building infrastructure
The problem with the US government is lobbyism. It does not work for itself, it does not work for the people, it works for big corporations and lawyers.
Eventually the pendulum swung in the other direction and people gained the ability to stop urban freeways, but now the pendulum has swung too far and people will sue projects out of existence.
China's land rights (or lack thereof) are not uncontroversial, and I would be surprised if they don't become a flashpoint in the future.
Here’s my hypothesis: when it comes to infrastructure, the operative word is not yet, it’s therefore. Autocrats have a much easier time cutting through any red tape put up by those lower on the food chain than them.
In a democratic society, such as the US, there are countless stakeholders who need to be included in the process for huge infrastructure projects like this. Unfortunately, too many chefs spoil the broth as they say.
Another factor may be that the US has elections every 4 year. There is no long-term planning happening, because who knows what's happening in 4 years. Too much energy is spent on political campaigns, destroying your opponent and getting re-elected.
China is much more willing to force people out of their homes for the greater good. It will be interesting to see which prevails.
I think that a big reason for this is that the US already has a half-working solution in place. Some infrastructure already exists that fulfills this role. China, on the other hand, didn't have much of an alternative in place, thus it was easier to find the will to build it.
We saw the same thing with internet connectivity and government services in Eastern Europe. Governments built much more modern infrastructures and offered more modern services because they weren't burdened by the past.
If the Chinese government wants to put a train line where houses, farms, or offices used to be, they do it. One, because they already own the land. And two, the faster goods and services can move, the faster the economy can grow.
Not an advocate for socialist/communist capitalism, but this is one area where central planning can move a little faster than the west. One are the west can vastly improve is permit streamlining.
A major problem with train systems in the United States (and this is both short and long haul) is that almost the entire country is sprawl - built around the automobile.
In dense environments (China and the north-east coast of the US (which has Acela), it's great to take a train into the core -- you beat traffic and are near your destination.
In sprawling environments (like most of CA), the benefit of ending up in the core is so much less (possibly even negative). Lower probability you are near your destination. And if you need to drive, now you are in a much worse situation (higher car rental prices due to high land values, you are stuck in traffic trying to leave the urban core, etc.).
In other words, even if you had a train, most individuals still will prefer driving (you have a car with you) or flying (faster than trains) -- killing the ROI on building the train in the first place.
this is an excuse i have repeated myself, but it is just that, an excuse. have you actually been to china? i have never seen such sprawl. shanghai is massive and sprawling. but yet, they (china) have extremely efficient and unbelievably cheap trains and subways. also, i have never seen a cleaner subway than what i saw in shanghai.
and this excuse doesn't even account for regions like the northeast. the amtrak from boston to new york takes four hours at its absolute fastest and costs couple hundred dollars. this is unbelievably sad. in china, the same ride would take about 1.5 hours and cost around $20 for business class (in u.s. terms, as in china, it's called first class).
It's also way more comfortable and relaxed. I prefer train over driving when I'm going somewhere too.. well until I discovered lane assist functions in modern cars that is :)
But I can't yet work while driving so I guess the train wins in overall productivity.
Flying is also a massive hit to the environment so I try to minimise it. So far I've avoided three roundtrips with planes and driven my car instead, but I've had to fly twice when going Oslo->Helsinki->Oslo.. I should probably have driven there too but for this instance time was of the essence.
In Europe and Asia these networks are generally separated.
The American model means that passenger trains need to be built to freight-train safety standards, that a passenger car must be engineered to "survive" a potential collision with a freight train, since that is a possibility.
American passenger trains don't own their right-of-way, and freight companies really don't care about high-speed anything since their business model doesn't require it.
In Seattle the light rail was pressured to serve the poor communities. Once built, they belatedly discovered that a transit station causes gentrification around it, pushing out the longtime residents. So they've tried zoning to prevent development around the transit station, which then reduces the ROI on the system.
edit: article says 2200, maps says 900ish
The United States wasn’t going to build these. Americans have been making excuses since the 1970s.
Jerry Brown tried to build the CA bullet train 4 decades ago.
Electric cars, electric buses, bullet trains, low-speed maglevs, high speed maglevs... China is making it happen!
In America, all we want is “drill, baby, drill”
Amusing to me he did the Rip Van Winkle and popped up as Governor again after 30 years. In office he pushed hard to get CHSR built. Every time California's high speed rails come up on HN it's obvious that everyone here hates the idea. So the US is getting what it's collectively asking for and deserves here.
Actually, it is much easier to build a pipeline, now that I think about it..
No rule of law, organ harvesting, labor camps.... China is making it happen!
In the rest of the world, people are fine with ride sharing.
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The elected and appointed officials of both parties serve their parties first. The party is more important than any one elected official and certainly more important than the voters.
high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world. the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless. In an authoritarian state like China the state can tell people were to live which makes it far easier to put services where those people are. Let alone the one item ignored is that much of the population does not travel long distance and that holds true for many countries. So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do and it makes a great jobs program and political payday as well
This isn't true. High speed rail is alive and well in Europe. Geography, politics and history are all significant factors that you can't explain so easily.
> the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless
Highly speculative. Nothing beats rail for capacity to move a lot of people around quickly.
> So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do
Quite the opposite.
It makes a lot more sense to have a self driving car drive you to the high speed rail station, and then drive you from the train station to your final destination. Self driving cars don't run at 160+ mph, but high speed rail does.
Yes, the 'bygone days' of maglev trains. I don't know if you've ever travelled in Japan or China but the convenience and comfort of high speed rail easily surpasses flying. And in many cases, so does the speed.
In most normal countries, rail is critical transport infrastructure. It's not a conspiracy.
Passenger railways make sense in places where one metropolis is close to another, and to yet another, etc, with suburbs commuting to these cities, too. This is what you see in Europe like Germany / Netherlands / France, this is what you see in central Japan, this is what you see in coastal China; all these places have very high population density, It works to an extent in US Northeast. All these places have dense and working passenger railways.
But they are a major investment that needs to be repaid, so they need a lot of use. I don't think I'd pay twice as much to get from NYC to Philadelphia twice as fast (say, 45 minutes instead of 90-100), and even 4 times as fast (say, 20 minutes). It would cost comparable to hiring an small airplane already, because there's no such a mass daily ridership. And most places in the US are much lower density. Airplanes are more economical over large sparse spaces.
Fully autonomous self driving cars are decades away[0] - assuming 15-20 years that about 20% of one's lifetime, developing rail is only a few years effort.
I do not understand how electric cars would doom rail.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.in/transportation/cars/experts-s...
And it has the problem of a massive carbon footprint to go along with it. If we are serious about combatting climate change, we need to find ways to move as people with as much throughput and convenience as airplanes today without burning as much fossil fuel.
Given that electric commercial flight is a way off, high speed electric trains are an existing technology to achieve that.
Presumably that's even truer in China (where 'Party' is capitalized), but at least they're getting a high-speed rail out of the deal.
Especially once highway miles are all self driving.
Yeah I can: approximately nothing. What exactly would you do with such a train? Neither LA nor San Diego have meaningful downtowns or local transit, so you'd still need a 45 minute drive on each end to get from/to where ever you're actually going. It's a 2.5 hour drive door-to-door today, so now you've just got a three-seat journey where there was once a one-seat trip, to maybe shave 30 minutes off journey time.
Moreover, there's no technology that could build such a train. LA to to San Diego is 200 kilometers. It would almost certainly need to make stops like Anaheim, Irvine, Oceanside, etc.. Oh, by the way, there's a mountain range between the two. Even state-of-the-art HSR would struggle to maintain 200 km/hour over the entire route. So now your train ride is an hour, and you've actually saved no time.
The cost of labor, the cost of environmental studies, the cost of materials, and the need for the project to show a profit.
All of these factors are much different in China.
Skipping phase 0 design also eliminates any potential political and nimby dissent (where all options are ruled out as "unfeasible").
Is there no national/public interest exception in the constitution just for such cases? Where you take someone land buy you pay or give equivalent land back(I know some people would like to get rich quick in this situations)
See in Australia how difficult it has been to build a high speed rail between Melbourne - Sydney one of the busiest domestic route in the world.
Edit - I dont mean to imply democracies are bad. It is just that things are hard to get done.
Everyone in the Central Valley will simply vote against whatever California wants to spend money on unless if overwhelmingly benefits them, or “hurts” those in the cities.
I know this isn’t the only reason the high speed rail project was canned, but those in the Centra Valley opposed it unless it connected some stretches like Fresno <-> Bakersfield together.
Why would they support being essentially left behind?
1. Corporate income taxes don’t generate much revenue, and the revenue they do bring in is even smaller relative to the amount of harm and economic distortion it causes. It really only carries on because it’s a useful political football and because having it appeals to a certain sense of “fairness.” There’s really no correlation between corporate taxation and infrastructure, and we might even be better off without the former altogether.
2. The US does spend a lot every year on infrastructure, but it gets relatively little bang for its buck, especially in comparison to places like China; even other advanced economies (France, UK, etc.) seem to be better at controlling costs for these types of projects.
3. We also spend a ton of money every year on precisely the wrong type of infrastructure. The Federal government, in addition to every state and local government, spends enormous sums every year on not only maintaining existing roads, but also widening, adding lanes, or even building new ones. In fact I remember reading that something like one out of every two dollars spent on roads goes to build new ones, even as people decry that the government isn’t adequately maintaining the roads that already exist. That’s insane - but it’s tied up in how funds are allocated, cost sharing agreements, etc. that often comes out of Congress. In short, the Feds will pick up an enormous proportion of the tab for building new state and local roads, but contribute very little to maintaining them. It should be easy to see, then, that building new roads is often more lucrative for contractors, politicians, governments, etc. than simply maintaining what they already have.
4. All the money we just talked about spending on roads is money that was not spent on upgrading sewers, water, power, public services, and everything else that help support denser urban areas like New York. So in effect, we are starving economically vibrant cities like NY of federal funds at the same time we subsidize the continued expansion of suburbia, none of which have the density required to make massive investments in things like railroads anywhere close to economically viable.
I hate that you use this term. Every government is like a flawed human being. I see it as a spectrum but HN sees it as The USA way or the HighWay.
The autocracy and maintenance of that autocracy is exactly how the Chinese government can show up the US. A centralized government with no ulterior profit agenda is exactly the central pillar to make unbiased decisions without resistance.
https://seattletransitblog.com/2016/04/07/st3-is-slow-becaus...
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California has no shortage of funding for the transit. The failed bullet connection had more funding then the system in China that carries 10x people. Stop blaming "evil corporations" for failures of local and State governments.
Buy an car transporter, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Truck.ca...
Convert it to being an electric trolley bus https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/Va...
Haul people and their cars around from city to city, saving them gas, letting them work with wifi.
Dropping taxes on companies has nothing to do with it. Many European countries have lower corporate taxes than we do, and no OECD country raises significant revenue from corporate taxes. It’s a red herring and a distraction. The issue is we have a political system that makes infrastructure enormously more expensive and hard to build than in Europe (much less China). In Maryland, people are lobbying to get light rail stations torn down that have already been built! The average time spent in “environmental review” for a government project is 5 years, and its really just an opportunity for a small minority to hold up and delay infrastructure projects. But that system is a reflection of our values. We don’t build things because we would rather prioritize other values.
That is what it is. We are good at other things! We’re good at things like Silicon Valley, that don’t require centralized cooperation and people falling in line. Lots of countries have the political discipline to build rail. But there is no other Silicon Valley! (What more needs to be said about why California doesn’t have rail, beyond noting that the state’s most significant industry is based in the suburbs/exurbs of an otherwise second tier city?)
"If California was a country"
You (US) are now segueing into the introspective phase of Empire - that's when you learn a few lessons. When you realise that deploying more (aircraft)carriers than everyone else combined is simply a thing or spending way more on cough defence than anyone else is a thing as well, and it isn't as important as some other things.
Anyway, I hope your journey from Irvine to Los Angeles was at least comfortable.
The world turns ...
The US is a country of checks and balances. Viewed differently, it's easy to obstruct changes. On average this works well, as it's far more likely for any random change to be bad rather than good. The unfortunate side effect is that many good changes don't happen, because it's so difficult to overcome all the "checks and balances".
In an authoritarian regime, changes edicted from the top encounter very little opposition. In post-Mao China, lots of these changes were wise, but not all. In the majority of the authoritarian regimes though the story is a bit less rosy.
Can we have our cake (checks and balances) and eat it too (more good changes get done) ? That's a tough question, I personally don't have the answer. But it seems more likely that once China builds a larger network of high-speed rail, the US would get some type of competitive impulse, and start investing in this too. One can only hope ...
Further down this thread is a link to this video called, "Why is China so good at building railways?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JDoll8OEFE
The presenter and quite a few commenters seem to have a built-in bias towards rail. Don't get me wrong. I love a good train journey and prefer it to flying when it's competitive. But the video tries to be an optimistic take on what a cold eye could only describe as totally mad and dysfunctional government.
The situation according to the video can be summed up like this:
• China has built tons of high speed rail very fast, this is amazing!
• But they do it because their internal airlines suck incredibly badly.
• There are only three carriers, none of which are budget. Planes are on time only about 65% of the time, which is a staggeringly low figure. The cause is enormous congestion in the air leading to air traffic control frequently denying takeoff rights.
• This bizarre situation occurs because the Chinese Army controls almost all the airspace above China and refuses to let civilian flights anywhere except a few corridors.
• Rather than get the army under control and open up flying to competition, China decided to build tons of railways instead.
• These railways are all heavily subsidised. Theoretically some in the east are profitable, but this is more than offset by railways built along totally unviable routes. For one route the ticket sales don't even cover the cost of electricity, let alone construction debt.
• Because HSR requires long straight lines without sharp curves, HSR railway stations are often as far away from city centres as airports are (France has this problem too). That eliminates one major advantage of rail over flying.
The Chinese taxpayer is forced to pay for these economically insane projects because it's all a part of Beijing's control (or oppression) of Xinjiang and Tibet.
For vague and to me inexplicable reasons, Beijing thinks building expensive and slow railway lines between outer region cities that don't have much travel demand will somehow prevent rebellions. The logic of this is not elaborated in the video, but it's hard not to assume the railways are intended for future military use if there's a need to move lots of troops into these regions.
Now let's compare this to America, which according to Hacker News consensus is some terrible backwater in comparison.
America has perhaps the world's best domestic airline network. Competition is intense, prices are low, travel times are very low, planes travel freely in huge quantities and the airlines are (sorta) profitable without taxpayer subsidies.
America also has an extensive and heavily used railway network, but it's used for freight rather than passengers. This makes sense for all kinds of physical and economic reasons.
HSR doesn't really exist in America, but this isn't because American society is dysfunctional. It's because the massive subsidies and land clearance required are hard to justify when you have an excellent flight network, which operates just fine. Take away "suppress rebellion" and "the military causes 40% of flights to be delayed" as motivating reasons and suddenly the US decisions don't look so bad. Those checks and balances seem to be working out pretty well.
But I think it's a hard problem in the U.S. Autocratic governments just decide to do something and plow over anyone who gets in their way. The country I live in now is actually starting to lay track for a high speed rail system to connect the centrally located capital and major outlying cities, and all the way to the northern and southern borders. It did take a while to get started, because everyone had to decide how the contracts would be divided up among their cronies and how the kickbacks would be paid. But it is getting done, because if anyone stands in the way the government declares a threat to the security of the country and sends in the soldiers.
Boston has infrastructure problems to a degree Seattle doesn't experience because when the Seattle core burned to the ground, it was rebuilt in some critical areas with newer infrastructure and thinking.
If you were a Bostonian or Chicagoan in that era, you were patting yourself on the back because your town hadn't burned in 20 years, and would not again. Today Seattle residence scratch their heads at some of the problems that Chicago and Boston have.
Similarly, residents of Tokyo were 'forced' into cellphones because even the 'burbs were so dense that installing new data lines was hugely expensive. 2-4 times the cost of a cellphone for a year. We were sucking down DSL+ speeds and looking jealously at their cool phones.
And yet now Japan has a nationwide FTTH grid to the point where the telco has discontinued new ADSL signups.
Unfortunately you don’t really get one without tending to get the other.
You don't need a totalitarian regime to get modern infrastructure. That's just a ridiculous statement.
I've tried to dig for references, but it's very difficult to find discussions 2+ years back, let along official news.
The USA's rail system is shit because of lack of investment, and misaligned incentives. It's cheaper to fly, or drive, than to invest in rail, even though rail is very efficient (and i suspect, more environmentally friendly than either of the above).
1) We have the curse of being first. Our cities are old so our infrastructure is old.
2) We can't just say, "Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week"
They can also cut corners on safety and pollution. The ends always justify the means.
didn't they say that when they arrived 400 years ago
You kinda can, via eminent domain. Maybe the will isn't there, but the way is.
My understanding is in China the government owns all the land to begin with, you lease it from them. But I guess in this case it would be "your lease is terminated, thanks"
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>>autocratic and repulsive... I agree the govt's autocratic but disagree it's repulsive.
well, that train railway and its stops and other infrastructure would have to be build over somebody's lands/homes - the somebody's lives would have to be significantly impacted against their will. "The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few"? Especially that in practice those "Many" are frequently just some other, more influential, "Few".
>an autocratic and repulsive Government
that is a one [brutally] efficient way to outweigh the needs of the few ...
What would be really depressing would be getting stuck with the hidden bill for this stuff. Sentiment like yours is why politicians can dangle the carrot of rail in front of the public for decades and keep cashing out.
It's just not that great a choice of transport on most legs in the U.S; and most places where medium- and high-speed rail makes sense in the U.S. already have it, at some price that keeps it somewhat occupied.
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"green tech investment and high tech public transport systems" = actually helps the people
Start by fixing misinformation about what is the PRC and the "democractic" US.
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That's what California gets for electing governors George Deukmejian. Pete Wilson, Gray Davis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Don't despair. We have Greta Thundberg. Just look at https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/she - it's doing well!
Any big economy has big incumbents.
> Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins?
Can you imagine what airlines and aerospace companies would think about it?
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You're not going to get very many high cost infrastructure problems solved when the government doesn't force the issue. Socialism is a red herring, the real greatest enemy of capitalism is the unregulated free market.
China also has the lowest organ recipient lists, maybe we should try to emulate that too:
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-u...
If your Federal Reserve stopping adding nonsense imputed and hedonic values to the tune of about ~$7 trillion to your economy's GDP, you would find yourself in second place.
Which might make help explain away your confusion :)
Have you considered that richness is not measured correctly? Since GDP is effectively consumption, the more a person consumes, the richer a country is. A thousand people driving 5 hours between LA and SF will make the country richer. Not the people, which China appears to be wanting to do.
Not clear yet if this is the early stage of a global trend, and even it it is, it may take a long time to have an effect in the US, where there are fewer good alternatives.
If you aren't concerned with cheap or green, and want to focus on fast... Then high speed rail might be a better option until the TSA is involved.
http://www.ushsr.com/hsr/completesystem.html
This paper shows only about a 3% to 20% improvement in co2 per passenger mile by shifting air traffic to already existing hsr in Europe (200-800km trips, taking into account embedded energy, and assuming %50 will be recyclable, which I think is quite optimistic)
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/6205714
I have used the high speed line between Wuhan and GZ (and through to HK) several times. It’s currently a 4.5 hour direct journey (once per day) or a 5 hour journey if you change at GZ or Shenzhen. The HSR is 300ish km/h at the moment and that route stops about 4-5 times along the way, off memory.
Aside, I also don’t know how much benefit 1000 km/h travel would bring. That’s an enormous energy requirement to accelerate up to such a speed only to stop 4-5 times along the way. 600 km/h would likely be much more realistic, because if you shorten the duration too much you run into the wall of needing to accel/decel constantly to make the stops.
Lastly, the HSR there is already capable of 350 km/h at least, but they limited it to 300 km/h after a massive derailment that caused a heap of fatalities years ago and never increased it back up again. It may be reading into it too much, but it may also be telling that they didn’t see the benefit of upping the top speed again even when considering the loss of face.
That's the big one. What HSR needs is not even higher top speed but some control breakthrough that allows much higher train frequencies in order to cut down on stops via more trains that can serve more specialized connections (e.g. the local/through etc). No idea what that breakthrough might be, perhaps something as crazy as rocket-assisted emergency braking.
If you go from Shanghai to Suzhou via HSR a train goes roughly every 15 minutes. Most trains going east go through Suzhou (since it is a major hub) and it is roughly 30 minutes away which is a decent distance so worth stopping for. The train only gets to maximum speed for about 15 minutes in the middle.
At 1000 or even just 600 km/h, wind resistance would do some damage just by letting off the accelerator.
State-of-the-art high-speed trains at 350 km/h tend to waste less time than planes for distances shorter than about 1000 km if you include the time it takes to get to the airport, check-in, go through security, and all that nonsense. Beyond 1000 km journeys, planes tend to be more time-saving.
1000 km/h is about the cruising speed of an aircraft so if it were possible to achieve that with a train, it would no longer make sense to take planes for the same journey -- which would be HUGE plus for comfort for, say, trips between Europe and Asia. Imagine for a 10-hour journey that you could walk around freely, enjoy massive amounts of legroom, enjoy the views of Siberia, sleep in peace and quiet, dine at a dining table, and not have to be strapped into a seat all the time. For high-volume routes it is also likely to be lower-carbon in the long run than air travel, and at the very least, can be powered on something more sustainable and less polluting than jet fuel. The bulk of your environmental impact would come from laying the track itself, so it would have to be a route of extremely high tourism or business importance, e.g. Shenzhen-Shanghai-Beijing-Moscow-Warsaw-Frankfurt-Paris-London or some such. Or Los Angeles to New York.
Where is America on HSR?
At near sea level, the drag at those speeds is absolutely brutal. Airplanes win, although they’re harder to electrify.
If you extrapolate current Maglev designs to 1000km/h, for energy consumption per passenger mile is about 0.5kWh/(passenger-mile).
Airplanes are on the order of 100mpg/passenger, or 0.33kWh/(passenger-mile) even with the relatively low conversion of chemical energy to mechanical in a jet engine. An electric aircraft could get about 0.1-0.2kWh/(passenger-mile) with the same airframe if the battery chemistry is appropriate for that flight length. Improve the airframe, and <0.05kWh/(passenger-mile) is possible.
Length of electric flight is limited, but 1000km is possible with current chemistries. America’s near-term HSR routes are on the order of 500km, so electric flight is feasible.
This is why “Hyperloop” (or vacuum trains generally) are and were a good idea at the high end for high speed rail, in spite of all the mocking that Elon Musk incurred for the idea (which he/SpaceX popularized and funded student competitions for, although the idea is an old one). Otherwise airplanes win on efficiency.
Most high-speed trains don't carry all their fuel with them. They get it from the network.
This will all change as battery technology improves but at the moment I cannot see it getting better trains.
That being said I expect that the 1000km/h speed will be like the Shanghai to Beijing track that got up to maximum speed a few times for the record and has since been reduced to make it more economical.
Even if this does happen and the train reaches 1,000 for a single trip and then drops back to a safer and more profitable speed of 600km/h or 800km/h it is still faster than what we have now and is a massive improvement.
I disagree. This is a chicken-or-egg problem. Nobody is inherently against public transit. Having commuted in a few cities in North America, it's far more comfortable than sitting in traffic. If you have a good system, i think people would use it. The GO Train in the Greater Toronto Area is a good example; it's filled to the brim with white-collar city workers.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra#/media/File:Metra-System...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%22L%22
American here. I do not think your class argument is correct with regards to commuter rail (though it probably is true for bus transit).
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Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.
More and better public transport in EU? For same reasons: less democracy and less market economy. More government-owner land, larger fraction of renters who just want cheaper rents (and public transport gives it to them), and they vote in the right direction, less legal opportunities for NIMBYsm.
It's a rail line from Houston to Dallas. It's not going to happen, unless the legislature goes full bore socialize-the-losses and subsidizes it.
https://twitter.com/metronorth
We're struggling with rain and leaves.
https://twitter.com/FuckNjTransit
Please, I urge you to watch this. It explains thoroughly why the situation for railroads is very different between China and America.
tl;dw: America is more spread out, has better airline control, and less of a political incentive to expand public transport, than China.
BUT, I was a little unnerved by how much the train jostled at some points. It was like the supports for the track had sunk in some places leading to the tracks no longer being aligned.
Not really informed by anything concrete, but I think there’s a disaster waiting to happen there. China has nowhere near the safety culture I’m used to in the states.
Now the conventional cars of the Shanghai metro? I really with the west coast of the US had infrastructure like that!
From the Boeing 747 MAX incidents you can conclude that if there is a big pile of money involved then safety is a problem to be workaround of, though funny enough there are still people that blame the cause on the safety regulations, like if the regulations were not present then Boeing and the free market (with only 2 competitors) would solve the issues
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Another reason could be that it wasn’t the time of the day when it goes up to max speed ( it only reaches 400km/h on certain time of the day, some days only. other time it’s just 350 or something like that)
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https://money.cnn.com/2005/06/23/news/fortune500/retail_emin...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/prison...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/01/chinese-highwa...
Make no mistake I'm a staunch supporter of democracy and freedom and despise the fact that China is lacking in both probably as much as you do. But please get your facts straight and refrain from using your imagination to comment on a country you most likely have never been to.
Be careful making excuses that don't apply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
It’s a glimpse of the next project in preparation: the megacity of Xiong’an, which is to be built until 2050 to complement Beijing and Tianjin, totalling an area of about 110 million people.
This is all just very hard to fathom.
Chinas maglev was a seimens tech transfer circa 2002, siemens / thyssenkrup disbanded their maglev company in 2008 after the munich line plan was abandoned.
So no one is interested in conventional maglevs, the cost per mile i imagine is not worth it. If you make it 1k kph however and reduce airport build spends this cost may change drastically. If you can get your superconducter cooling sorted.