The Long, Sad History of American Attempts to Build High-Speed Rail, Part II

That’s a function of the train speed. If the train traveled at 300 mph, then LA<->SF becomes faster than Brightline’s 180 mile LA to Vegas route, which looks like it will average 100 mph.

Do trains require more staff per seat? Amtrak trains seem to have 2 staff in the car and I assume 2 engineers, and roughly (5 car consist of 72 seats) 360 passengers, vs 4-6 people for 180 people on an A320.

In Europe, it seems like HSR stations are often in greenfield locations outside of town. In California it became some hypothetical "downtown revitalization" scheme. But Bakersfield etc really should want better local public transit.

This is absolutely not true in France, where the TGV mostly takes regular lines to exit the suburbs of every city it goes through.

> It appears in the US many of these plans rely upon lower costs where the train is built on the ground. So they end up building tons of small bridges, regrading roads, moving wires, moving drainage, communication equipment etc as the train interacts with existing infrastructure

Building elevated is a shit-ton more expensive

Compare Seattle Link to the Vancouver sky train for one example. Or the 2nd ave subway in New York. Or all of the transit we’ve built in the middle of literal freeways (LA, DC, SF). And why oh why are we building light rail everywhere when regional or heavy rail would be a better fit? It’s tough to be optimistic.

You don’t have to come up with some crazy new innovation for Mag-Lev, just make the trains reliable, affordable, and near major population centers.

So now we're talking about wealthier people and (somewhat overlapping) business travelers who tend to value comfort, convenience, and schedule to at least some degree over cost. Never say never but it seems a tough sell for most city pairings/routes given that just acquiring land would be a huge cost even if everything else were free.

The short answer is "everything".

Let's start either public desire. Nobody wants a 300mph train to go through their neighborhood. Especially a train they'll likely never ride. One that doesn't stop locally.

Since public interactions are an important part of any major project in the US this has a real cost implication.

Equally public perception en masse leads to the project becoming political, so it can't fly under the radar. (It benefits at least some politicians to be anti so they're anti regardless of merit.)

Get past the people, and you get into the environment. Long distance trains cover a Lot of land so lots and lots on environmental impact studies to do.

So you're spending mountains of cash before you can even be assured the project will happen. Because its such high risk, that cash comes very expensive. (Politically expensive if its public funds, commercially expensive if its loans or investments. )

If you got this far, construction is expensive because you're not just "laying track". Everything you touch will be subject to a million local regulations, which will differ from one county to the next. You will need an army of lawyers, inspectors, endless tweaks here and there, and so on.

The trains will be expensive. Any craft travelling at 300mph will necessarily be expensive. You'll want it to be safe, which means (quite reasonably) this is not an area to be cheap.

You specified maglev, but that is almost the least interesting part. All the above applies to any rail project. Maglev adds to the cost primarily in terms of tech, and the results of tech failing. (The train would need to safely transition between maglev and not maglev, at 300mph).

So, to answer your question, you need to ignore the public, ignore the environment, ignore the effect of public opinion on politicians, ignore local regulations, be able to aquire land (in a straight line) without hindrance, and of course source a cheap train.

And at the end of it? Maybe you'll have a train people will ride. Maybe you won't. (For reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm guessing won't).

However, it’s not necessary that there actually are significant economies of scale to be achieved with Maglev.

But the bigger issue is that it’s not clear why anyone outside of Japan would even build Maglev at the moment.

For obvious reasons, faster speed only becomes advantageous beyond a certain distance. But pretty much every country in the world has city pairs where HSR isn’t built out and the distances are too short for Maglev to be built. Any country trying to go in for a high speed transit option is likely to connect these city pairs first before they try city pairs at greater distances where Maglev may actually make sense even ignoring cost.

So you’re unlikely to see a mass rollout of Maglev for decades, so the actual correct answer is that what you need to make Maglev more cost efficient is a few decades and economies of scale.

The problem is that there is no capability to build such infrastructure anymore. Neither in the US, nor in Europe. It requires both political will and construction companies that build public infrastructure without being political party operatives.

EDIT: sorry I meant to write km/h, that's why the calculation is correct at 15 hours => 4668/300.

The tl;dr is that according to physics, making stuff float is hard.

"...car travel is much cheaper in the US than in many other countries, making high-speed rail comparatively less competitive"