Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

The northeast US conurbation is one of the densest conglomerations of urban centres in the world. A proper high-speed rail system would take you from NYC to Philadelphia in less than an hour and to Boston or DC in a couple of hours. The ”US is so big and sparsely populated” excuse really doesn’t hold water.

View on HN

The NEC is the one exception to the rule that the US is too big and sparsely populated to support dense intercity rail. (For comparison, the distance between NYC and Chicago is longer than the distance between Copenhagen and Zürich, which is to say, it's longer than the longest axis of Germany.)

The reason why we have such shitty HSR on the NEC boils down to two reasons: one, the corridor is too congested with commuter rail (particularly in Connecticut), and two, the route was rebuilt to "modern" standards in the 1930s. Rebuilding it again to truly modern 220 mph HSR standards involves needing to find virgin right-of-way in Connecticut, which is neither easy nor cheap.

The US is designed differently than the other heavily developed areas of the world. It's not about being "too big" or "not dense enough", it is more complicated than that.

The Northeast US has a similar statistical density as areas of Europe but looks so much physically different. Take some time on Google Earth and check it out. There is a nonstop blob of suburbs that go almost all the way from DC to Boston. In a proposed train network, most of the population has a long trip to the central station before they can take the train to the other city. They still need a car, and need somewhere to park it. In Europe or Asia cities are more concentrated, and the countrysides are less populated.

Building a center-city to center-city train network in the US is not impossible, but it simply wouldn't be as efficient as it would be in Europe or Asia because of the way the cities are designed.

Sure. Obviously it would require a new approach to planning and zoning. As the article says, rail corridors are obvious places for high-density mixed-use development. That aside, driving to a station and taking a train from there is still better than no trains at all.

The article presents DC's park and ride station as "a perfect example of WHAT NOT TO DO". But it's really all they can do if they must force a train system into an area without the right kind of density.

I very much agree we need a new approach to planning an zoning. We need to focus on that first. It could take longer than a generation to transition away from the suburban model.

Its really insane people defend shortcomings in the US by either saying US is big or saying US is too diverse. Very depressing.

The argument is that building train lines isn't the answer because the transport needs in the U.S. are different than Japan, Indonesia, Germany, Russia, etc. Having a cookie cutter "trains are the answer to everything" answer is shortsighted.

Can you please tell me what are those different needs are?

Have you ever been to Japan, Germany, etc? Cities there are shaped completely differently to cities here. The article uses the Vienna Metro as an example of what not to do, and in a way it is. But it’s that way because Vienna is almost entirely low density sprawl, with homes sitting on a quarter of an acre or so. The whole DC metro area is shaped that way, and that drove the structure of Metro. The DC Metro area has 6 million people, about the same size as the Berlin metro area. But 3.7 million Berliners live in the city itself, while just 700,000 Washingtonians do. Berlin and DC are similar of a similar density, but almost all the DC Metro population lives out in the low density suburbs. A lot of the jobs are out there too. A lot of tech jobs are in Reston and Dulles, 20-25 miles west of DC. Do you know what’s 20 miles west of Berlin? Nothing, it’s farm land. The kins of transportation network a city like DC, where the population and jobs are spread out among low density suburbs, and a city like Berlin, with population and jobs concentrated in the core city, needs are completely different.

Primarily: the need to get around in whichever city/area you are in once you get there. In all but the most dense cities (NYC/SF/Chicago), you have to have a car to get around. If I had a high speed train to get between Kansas City and Houston it still wouldn't do any good because you need a car to get around when you arrive. This is true for nearly every area of the USA. We tend to build out, rather than up, making public transport impractical and expensive. Building out does have the advantage of keeping land/home prices relatively low, though.

Many Americans prefer the freedom of being able to go A to B at any time without needing to wait at a bus/subway stop or hoping the transportation system is still running for the day. The amount of money it would cost to get the entire country walk able or reachable by public transit would be astronomical.

> Primarily: the need to get around in whichever city/area you are in once you get there. [...] If I had a high speed train to get between Kansas City and Houston it still wouldn't do any good because you need a car to get around when you arrive.

That's probably true (modulo taxis, even if you rule out public transport), but it's just as true when you fly from Kansas City to Houston. Which is why airports always come with car rental, and it works out for those who want a car. If a car is really needed at the destination, arrangements could and should be made to have car rentals available at the train station.

> A proper high-speed rail system would take you from NYC to Philadelphia in less than an hour

I mean... the shitty high speed rail we have (Acela) does it in an hour and 8 minutes. Making it 55 minutes probably won't change travel patterns substantially. (Although route upgrades to support that is the medium term plan)

The problem with Acela is that vast stretches of it aren’t actually high-speed because freight is in the way. And even at peak speeds, it’s relatively slow wrt other high speed rail.

Nope. The NEC corridor, on which Acela runs, does not carry freight traffic (at least, not except for some rare trains at night). Acela's conflicts are with all of the commuter rail systems that share the track (MARC, SEPTA, NJT, Metro North, Shore Line East, and MBTA commuter rail), plus the regular intercity Amtrak service.

Also, think about California's Amtrack - going from San Diego via Los Angeles to San Francisco. Currently trip from San Diego to LA takes 2.5 - 3 hours. With proper bullet train SD-LA should take no more than 45-60 minutes, making it much more convenient than now, and more convenient than 2 hour drive via highway.

And SD - SF should be less than 4 hours, making it faster than a flight (if you count all the time wasted at the airports).

But what the hell do you do once you're dumped in the middle of SD or LA without a car?

You rent one :)

Or, better yet, you use (now non-existing) public transportation to go around.

Metro, Uber, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com