Why Do Conservatives oppose High Speed Rail?

That might come as a surprise to the people of Altoona!

I used to see GG-1's all the time. They used to be lined up outside Union Station in DC.

The one that fell through the floor of that station in 1952 is on display now at the B & O railroad museum in Baltimore!

 

Actually, planning and design for high speed on the Northeast Corridor is going on at present, and it will go through Manhattan.

I'm not sure what question you're asking. How am I going to manage what, exactly?


“Travel some time.”

"Taxcutter says:
I am a shellback and a Golden Dragon. My passport is raggedy from use. I am a million-mile driver. I have seen ever permutation of motel room from the no-tell-motels to the Greenbrier. I’ve stayed at the Royal Hawaiian and had a drink at Raffle’s in Singapore. Can you say that?"

Well, I have never stayed in the Royal Hawaiian or Raffles, but I have stayed in the Mark Hopkins, the Palmer House, the Waldorf Astoria, the Grand Intercontenintal (Paris), the Copley Plaza, Claridges, and quite a few others, and my passport was pretty dog eared as well, I am just now getting it renewed. I carry one of those black cards that gets you ino the exclusive lounges in most airports.

Since I've been driving 40-50,000 plus miles on business since the early 1980's, I don't bother to count whether I'm a million mile driver or not, but the simple math would suggest that I passed that mark quite some time ago.

But I've also taken the red eye from Dayton to Baltimore, changed at Midway to go to Kansas City, and a hundred other mundane excursions which are the true haunt of the business traveller. I've been marooned by US Air when they cancelled flights that they didn't fill enough seats on, and stuck in Hartsfield, Douglas and Houston. I have been rebooked on alternative flights with changes and layovers that got me to my destination in longer than it would have taken to drive. But, by then, I had aleady invested three hours of my time in driving to the airport, riding the shuttle, and clearing security.

There isn't any glamor to those experiences.

But in many, if not most of them, high speed rail would have been a viable alternative, free from the hassles of US air travel. No security, no expensive cab ride or shuttle out to the airport, no standing in a parking lot in the rain waiting for a shuttle bus, no airport security, no overcroweded dirty airplanes with narrow, cramped seats.

I'm one of only three posters on this thread (up to 250 posts) that has apparantly EVER ridden on a real high speed rail.

Not only that, but I actually arranged that trip so I could compare and contrast the experience of going from London to Paris via Eurostar, with making the return trip via air.

The train won hands down, in time, convenience, comfort and was price competative.

There is no doubt in my mind that viable high speed rail between many of America's most popular business destinations would draw a significant amount of business travel.

The history of railroads also suggests that reliable high speed access to secondary cities will make them viable commutor routes as well. That has been the pattern as convenience and speed has increased throughout the history of mechanized transportation.

My home town is halfway between New York and Washington DC. We have people who have weekend places here and spend the week in both cities. Some commute daily to DC (as Joe Biden did for years, and still does on weekends). High speed would make the daily commute easy and practical, and transform the demographics of communities like mine (even if the train doesn't stop right here).

I find it odd that so few people see that. I have to admit that I didn't for a long time.

Mellenials are not interested in cars the way my generation was. I read an article not long ago, entitiled "Why Detroit can's sell me a car". I thought it was going to be a diatribe against the US industry. Instead it was a discussion of how mellenials have better things to do than drive cars. They like revived urban environments too, and are frequently the forces behind revival. Average miles driven in the US is falling now (for the first time since WWII (which shocked me)).At the end of the article, the author repeated the question and answered it. He told Detroit that he wanted a car that could drive itself, and so did most of his peers. For them, the open road is on the internet.

They are prime customers for high speed rail.

 

That's why you have a vote. Don't like something? Vote to get the guys implementing it, out. Ain't democracy grand?

 

When flying to Manchester NH, and renting a car and driving two hours to get to Boston is a viable alternative to flying into Logan Airport, the case for high speed rail makes itself!

 

Ok, which party is willing to get us into the next generation of high speed public transport?

 

Elon Musk?

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-12/revealed-elon-musk-explains-the-hyperloop

 

Its hard highjack a train and drive it into a skyscraper.

A TVG does not have such a fine line between horsepower and capacity that passenger baggage must be limited like it is on airplanes.

The populations has moved outward but the centre of population has not moved very far from the old city centre in most urban areas.

Driving from the city centre to the suburbs, which is the reverse of commuter traffic.

A hundred years ago the trains were faster than they are now. There were many routes where express trains averaged over 60 miles per hour and would hit speeds in excess of 100 mph for long stretches. This was before the welded rails that allow trains to travel even faster. These rights of way are still being used. While there are some places in the east and in the mountains where speeds are limited, these days they are more due to geography and lack of grade separation than winding Victorian rights of way, especially west of the Ohio river where the land is flat and the tracks run in long straight lines.

I have driven every interstate in the US from one end to the other multiple times. I have taken trains and buses all across the US, Canada and the EU. I have lived in Hawaii and Alaska, the US northeast, northwest, deep south and mid west. World traveller you may be but I have far more experience than you with the US transportation system.

Except that there is no will to electrify the US railroads because complaints about the cost drown out any discussion of the benefit. The biggest freight bottleneck in the US is two lines through Chicago that are not grade separated but no one has ever come up with the money it would take to fix that over the last 60 years.

$60Billion to electrify the lines and another $Trillion to replace the locomotives and build the power plants switchgear, substations and control systems necessary for it to actually work, might as well spend another $200Billion to straighten the tracks a little, reinforce the bridges and weld the track for 150 mile an hour passenger service along existing rights of way. That is what they are doing in Illinois right now to create a two hour train from Chicago to St Louis. They can do it without federal interference because the tracks are almost completely in Illinois.

It is noteworthy that the first electric train system was built in the US because NYC outlawed steam trains from the tunnels of Manhattan in 1903 after a series of horrific accidents. There are a lot of practical problems with electrifying the rails in the US and a big one is electricity generation and delivery, especially in the US northeast and California where electricity grids are near capacity already. Load balancing can also be a huge problem unless trains are scheduled in concert with electrical generating and distribution capabilities. In France the TVG runs mostly during the day and freight runs mostly at night to balance electricity demand. In the US this would require an unprecedented and possibly illegal level of coordination between the operators of power plants and trains.

 

Actually, the Baltimore and Ohio was doing the same thing at about the same time, and for the same reason.

I suspect that Taxcutter did all of his travelling while he was in the military, which, of course bears no relation to real world travel, and none at all to business travel. His use of the term shellback gives it away. I've never heard any ordinary traveller use that term, only Navy and Coast Guard guys.

You made many of the same points that I did in my response to his post. He ran away.

The sad thing about this thread is that it is heavily populated by people who rarely if ever travel, have little vision, and even less tolerance for appreciating something that works if it wasn't done here first.

Its a very parochial view.

 

A lack of "high speed" rail service is what helped the South lose the war.

 

Personally I don't understand the lefts obsession with high speed rail or just rail in general. They always say that we need it to "catch up with the rest of the civilized world" which makes me think they see it as a status symbol more than anything practical. Here in Portland the lightrail is a joke. It goes everywhere, costs a (*)(*)(*)(*) ton of money, and my god the Portland to Vancouver lightrail bridge they want to put in is a constant joke. They can never come down to steady plans, want the Fed and state to pay for what would only benifit the city, and the city of Vancouver wants nothing to do with it. Oh, and my favorite part; it's being built to cut down on I-5 congestion but will not have roads, only light rail, bike paths, and sidewalks. It's kinda like the new lightrail bridge they are building now...

As for high speed rail there may be some areas where it would help, but those areas need to figure out and fund it if they want it. I can see the advantage to the interstate highway and the nation wide rail system, but I do not see the benifit in the entire US paying to put a fast train to link a few major cities. If the economic benefits are so huge then let the states/cities raise the money themselves. Believe me, I don't want any federal funding for the new lightrail bridge here; nor do I want a pointless lightrail bridge here.

BTW someone suggested that Portland to Seattle was a good idea. As someone who lives in Portland I will tell you I would not take high speed rail up to Seattle. It's about 170 miles, and even if the train took an hour (and another to get back) I'm still looking at a commute to the rail station (likely 20-30 min) and a commute from the rail station (probably another 20-30 min). That's about 3 hours per day commuting. I don't live to commute. I may not have much of a life but I certainly am not going to spend hours of it going to work and back. The hour to hour and a half I work with is bad enough.

 

You can only build so many freeways and no matter how many you build they will be beyond capacity before they are finished. Alternatives are necessary if the US is to meet its transportation needs. Maybe you wouldn't commute from Seattle to Portland but there are plenty of people who live a short distance from the train stations who would take them regularly.

Anyway, high speed rail is not about moving daily commuters but business people and tourists like the airlines do but just as fast and more conveniently. I used to live in Seattle and if I could have taken high speed rail to Portland I would have gone there a lot more because I had numerous friends and business connections there. Driving is three hours minimum and flying is totally inconvenient but an hour on the train, with WIFI and cell service has a lot of appeal.

Now I live near Boston and the train to NYC is cheaper than flying and takes about the same time but without all the modern inconveniences of airline travel. You just get on the train and get off it 3 hours later in the middle of the city. If it was an actual high speed train it would only take an hour and a half. This would be a huge benefit for everyone. Amtrak moves almost 1,000,000 people a year through the northeast corridor. With high speed rail that could easily double or triple and take a lot of pressure off the already over capacity highways and airports that have no room to expand.

For the US to have continued economic growth it needs to continually invest in improving its infrastructure. If it does not the cost of delays in moving people and goods along overcrowded highways will continue to increase and is already becoming a serious impediment in the ability of US businesses to compete. Time is money. The expense of moving people and goods increases with the time it takes to do so. As the highways become ever more congested and slower with the intercity travel of people, freight costs rise.

China, with an economy less than a tenth of the size of the US, is building an interstate highway system larger than the US and a high speed rail network larger than the EU. Why? Because China needs high speed rail to entice people away from driving so the trucks can move. They have anticipated the problem because they see it in the US, the highways are overcrowded with personal travellers and that is increasing the cost of doing business in the US, especially around urban conglomerates like the northeast corridor, Chicago, Lake Erie, and others which China has plenty of.

I do not see how someone can see the benefit of the interstate highway system, the national rail system and the national air travel system, but not see a high speed passenger rail network as beneficial. Is it because asking them to pay for HSR is some imposition on them that the building of the interstates and railroads and airports did not impose on their predecessors?

 

So in summation you think we should have high speed rail because it gives tourists and business travelers an option other than the already existing options which include air, train, and road? I don't see how that could possibly be considered a good idea. We already have a huge amount of debt and a ridiculous deficit. A multi-billion dollar project to move tourists from point A to point B is the last thing we need to do.

 

Well, those are people who spend a lot of money and clog up the interstates and getting more them off the highways and out of the airports will bring a number of benefits to everyone else including a lower cost of goods because the less crowded highways will move goods more efficiently and less crowded airports will make flying less fraught as short and mid range travel moves to rail. The population and economic activity of the US will continue to grow but the nations highways and airports are already severely taxed in their ability to accommodate current usage and their ability to expand to meet the demands that greater population and economic activity requires is basically impossible.

There is no room to build all the new highways and airports needed to accommodate future growth in the major metropolitan areas where it is most likely to occur so alternatives to road and air travel in moving people are becoming a critical necessity. The most cost effective and efficient way to meet the expected increase in demand is to implement high speed passenger rail travel between metropolitan areas that are less than 500 miles apart. The US is uniquely situated to do that, with many thousands of miles of existing rail rights of way that would only need to be upgraded, especially in the mid west, where the cities are ideally situated and rail lines straight and level.

Do you have a better idea about how the US infrastructure can be improved to accommodate its future growth?

 

Those people are going where they are going anyway so the economic impact is negligible, other than we have built and must maintain and I assume subsidize a multi-billion dollar rail system. The less highway traffic/airport crowds assume that people will start using the train for transport rather than their current methods. Also worth noting that aside from a few areas (and rush hour) our transportation system is not over crowded. Drive across the country and I guarantee you'll only see traffic in heavily populated areas or around crashes/sudden dangers. Most of our airports are doing just fine as well. Some are stretched to the max but I don't see how a highspeed rail will solve that since planes can go anywhere an the rail would only link a few cities together in a line.

Really the congestion problems are issues in major cities, which are spread all over America and which a national highspeed rail won't solve because the problems are local. Hell Portlands local lightrail can't even solve its local traffic jams, and we supposedly have the best public transportation system in the US.

I remain entirely unconvinced. Highspeed rail seems to serve no real purpose. If we were dense like Japan and Europe, where a 15 minute ride can bring you to another major city, it would make sense. Here though we just don't have that density. There may be a few places and like I said if it makes sense there then go for it, at local expense, but for the most part it's just a waste of money.

 

I believe we should have MagLev in vacuum environments as a federal Standard to each of the several State capitols.

 

How's California's high speed rail project doing?

 

Isn't it interesting that most of those routes on the "one persons rendition of a hypothetical high speed network for North America" are the same ones that are currently operating at the greatest losses. In May of this year, the Brooking Institute published a study of Amtrak. In the report they showed that were less then 400 miles netted the company $47 Million, but routes more then 400 miles cost the company $614 Million. Speeding up the trains will not do much to change that fact.

Take the route from Chicago to LA as an example. The route is 2265 miles. Base logic would say that a train traveling at 210mph could make the trip in less then 11 hours, but that base logic fails to realize that there are 33 stops on that route. As a matter of fact, the longest leg is only 173 miles. Even with high speed service, the route would still take one 24 hours. So, other then the vacationer that wants to see the country without driving, no one would find that a reasonable transportation alternative.

http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2013/AmtrakRoutes

 

The US, from the east coast to the Mississippi and into Texas has a population density and distribution of cities very similar to that of the EU, So does California. It does make sense.

Have you ever even driven down the east coast or across the mid west?
Interstate 80 and 90 all the way from the east coast to Chicago are more crowded than I-5 between Portland and Seattle ever was. I-95 between Portland Maine and Richmond Virginia is even worse, especially during holiday weekends.
I have travelled extensively all over the US and I see the need for alternatives to highways and airports. The problems are not local, that is just where they are most apparent.

It may seem to you that only a few airports are at capacity but among them is Chicago, NY, Boston, DC, Atlanta, Dallas, LA, all centres of the US economy which have a large volume of regional traffic that high speed rail could replace at a lower cost than expanding capacity and bring economic growth to cities in between.

 

I am sure there are some through rail runs, and some stop runs between those points, just like aircraft that make hop destinations.

 

I believe advancing boring technologies may be beneficial for MagLev in vacuum environments.

 

Our population density isn't even close to the EU . The EU has 116 people for every square km, and the US has 35 People per square km. Not to mention Americans have a shorter commute time that most European countries.

 

Rail projects can make sense around Orlando the counties here are heavily supporting one but not HSR and there it makes sense for commuting workers and tourism, and Orlando has an amazing bus system and a commitment to mass transit. And this is in a Conservative state.

But does it make sense if one can fly, or use cheaper options if lower income like Amtrak or Greyhound?

 

Put it this way where High speed rail actually makes since the private sector will do it better and cheaper than the government.

 

The French government-run national rail service (SNCF), is posting recurring profits of just under £1 billion. That includes revenue from the TGV high speed lines. It works, and works extremely efficiently.

 

Which says aabsolutely nothing about whether or not the private sector could do it cheaper and more effieciently.