The Bottom Line on Top-Speed Trains | Hacker News Reader

The Bottom Line on Top-Speed Trains

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

9 pointscwan12 comments

"To dig holes in the ground," paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services. It is not reasonable, however, that a sensible community should be content to remain dependent on such fortuitous and often wasteful mitigations when once we understand the influences upon which effective demand depends. -Alan Keynes

http://www.businessweek.com/blogs/money_politics/archives/20...

Still, I'd like to have some decent public transportation in this country. Driving sucks.

Actually, I worry about the "paid for out of savings" part.

Few reason's why i will vote for HSR:

1. It's safer than car, very few or no accidents compare to highway accidents - so you can't put value to human life.

2. Compare to air and car drive, weather conditions doesn't impact HSR.

3. Peace of mind: Compare to driving car, its a peace of mind as you may relax rather than stressing out due to driving itself or weather or traffic jams etc.

4. Compare to air travel, there is no hijack like situation possible. i.e. peace of mind to government.

5. No matter how fast you drive a car or bus, you just can't beat HSR's speed and time saved due to speed. Plus no speeding ticket :)

I'm not a huge support of HSR, but I am a huge supporter of rail.

The main problem with rail is not necessarily speed. Current Amtrak trains are slow and painful because:

- They stop everywhere. There are hardly any express trains that run between major cities. This punishes the majority of inter-city travelers by forcing them to stop at every little village along the way, making the whole trip unbearably long compared to air, or even car.

- They share track with freight. I cannot count the number of times the train would stop just to wait for some 100-car freight train to pass. Passenger rail needs its own capacity, not piggy-backing on top of industrial rail.

You fix these two problems and instantly the majority of inter-city rail travel will suddenly already be competitive with air travel - and completely destroy car travel in terms of convenience and cost, for short to mid haul routes anyway. All of this without laying a single mile of special-gauge track, ludicrously expensive trains, and all using off-the-shelf, mature technologies that don't cost a quarter as much.

The solution to America's transportation woes IMHO is not sci-fi level technology. Yes, HSR may be justified in a few places, but for everywhere else, I think good old fashioned overhauling the existing rail system would do wonders.

i second with you - upgrading existing infrastructure or implementing small creative fixes will solve most of the problems and will also create huge amount of direct and indirect jobs ... huge benefit of infrastructure spending is you require people right at the site so no outsourcing (not that i'm aginst but still it helps local economy)

And imagine if I can get on a train in Seattle, and travel consistently at the train's top speed of, say, 80mph (pretty conservative), with no freight train stops along the way, and definitely no stops along every little town along the way...

I will be there in Portland in about 2 hours. This beats the pants off driving, and if you include the hassle of checking in early, security time, etc, will also beat the time for air travel.

And all of this with existing trains, no bullet trains, no mag lev, nothing fancy.

For this you get to enjoy:

- not having to drive - HUUUUUGE comfortable seats (take that, regional jets!) - relaxed security, no draconian rules - 1/4 to 1/3 the cost of flying, can probably beat the cost of driving if you were traveling alone - board at train station which is neatly downtown in most American cities - takes you right downtown at your destination in most American cities

What's not to love? Trains are by far my favorite way to travel, and IMHO the majority of problems preventing trains from being the choice for mid-range routes is purely systematic and organizational, and has relatively little to do with technology.

Just you wait.. one terrorist scare in a downtown city, and we'll be doing the shoes-off hokey-pokey to board trains, too :(

The fear of a terrorist attack isn't really a reason not to do things. And it's not like it hasn't happened before, remember the madrid (commuter train) and london (subway) bombings?

It hasn't happened before in the US....

For Eurostar (Paris<->London) there's a security checkpoint with x-ray and metal detector too. No shoes-off, but you don't have to do that for air travel in Europe either. I guess they're paranoid about the Chunnel...

The legroom on a standard Eurostar seat isn't any better than a plane either.

The Shinkansen, however, really is the gold standard for train travel in the world still: fast, convenient (no security), and frequent.

> will also create huge amount of direct ... jobs

So much for being inexpensive.

Rail is space efficient and can be energy efficient (if you can get the ridership), but those aren't the only important costs.

I voted for California's HSR once, but never again, since it's just so terribly expensive for what we get, despite my love of rail in general.

I do have some responses to your reasons:

1. Where's the data? I didn't think anything was safer than air, if one uses passenger-miles as the denominator (and fatalities in the numerator), nor that conventional rail has a particularly stellar record in this country.

2. I would imagine exactly the opposite is true, since rail is, by definition, limited to a fixed route. Assuming an extensive highway system (such as exists in the US), cars can drive around bad weather. Air travel, though perhaps more sensitive to lesser severity of weather, has even greater avoidance flexibility.

3. As someone who enjoys driving, the flip side to this is that relaxation begets boredom. Still, your point is well take, but it also could apply to air travel.

4. Although one can't steer a train into the Pentagon, I don't see how HSR would be immune to terrorism, especially considering that rail stations tend to be located in population centers, whereas airports tend to be remote.

5. This, again, is probably more applicable to air travel, given that a jet's speed is 2-3 times that of HSR. The trouble is that, unlike my car, a train doesn't pick me up at my origin, nor drop me off at my destination. Then, there's the issue of added latency, which, for a car, is close to zero. For a scheduled service, it's the amount of time until the next scheduled departure, plus a certain buffer time for checkin, baggage handling, and "security" procedures. This stretches out the door-to-door time to something much more competitive to driving, even without risking a speeding ticket.

Driving the 345 miles from my home near San Jose's airport to downtown LA could be done in 5.5 hours, with no stops and no speeding ticket risk. A flight takes about 45 minutes in the air, and the HSR trip is supposed to take 2.5 hours (presumably including stops).

Door-to-door, driving is still 5.5 hours. Air travel adds at least half an hour to get to and from the airport, another half hour to get on and off the plane, and at least another quarter hour for getting to the gate early enough, assuming no check in, checkpoint pantomime, baggage, or other delays, for a grand total of 2 hours (well, 3 hours if I'm trying to get into downtown LA at the wrong time). Even if the train is a quarter hour faster to get on and off, that's 3.5 hours.

If I'm going to Pasadena, driving is still 5.5 hours, but air and rail are 2.5-3.5 and 4. Add Threat Level Burnt-Umber to the equation, and air jumps to 3.5-4.5. I imagine that, until the first terrorist incident, HSR will remain at 3.5.

If I can't leave until noon, when flights (and, presumably, trains) are only once every couple-three hours, driving is 5.5 hours, air 4.5-5.5, and HSR 5.5. Suddenly, I'm wondering where all my saved time went :)

A worse air travel scenario actually occurred in recent memory, where a combination of my travel companion's schedule restrictions, excessive waits at the checkpoint, and mechanical trouble, caused flying to take longer door-to-door than driving would have, with only a net break-even for the round trip.

That's nice, but will you pay for it?

I think that HSR, Rail, subway, and commercial airlines are all like travelling in a bus. If that's your thing, great, but ....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com