this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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At least with younger folk yeah. Only people that hate trains are boomers and weirdos who think gasoline is the second manliest thing other than trump. It’s a huge project though, don’t know if I’ll ever live to see New York connected to Texas by high speed rail
Considering railroads have done over $200 billion in stock buybacks (about the cost for coast to coast high speed rail) I think it’s very possible, we just have to nationalize.
It’s very profitable to run a railroad into the ground and push as much shipping to trucks as you can.
It’s not profitable, it just lowers the operating ratio, which is what railroads (quite stupidly) judge their productivity on.
Operating ratio =/= more money despite what they think.
Mass transit has also burned quite a few people with reliability. The train not showing up on time was regular enough I had to stop using it to go to work. There is only so many times you can be late to work before it becomes your fault for not fixing the issue; in my case, by no longer taking the train and driving instead.
That's not an argument against trains, it's an argument for running them well.
How does the quote go?
"At least the trains ran on time"?
I don't think being a Nazi is strictly a requirement for having good train service. We should aim for non-Nazi good trains.
That quote was as often a quote of Weimar Germany, which the Nazis succeeded.
Nazi Germany tended to appoint all kinds of idiots to everything and all the most competent people had all their time wasted in "loyalty parties". Eventually even the trains stopped running on time by the end.
For long distance trains, check out the fact that the rules give mega-long cargo trains priority over passenger trains on Amtrak. This results in negative impacts to present rail.
The metro in DC is a perfect example lol
People still used the hell out of it up until the pandemic, despite having a terrible two track design, despite having delayed maintenance for essentially 30 years, and despite having three jurisdictions arguing over how to fund what is truthfully only a commuter rail, not a proper full system.
I'd love to see more investment in Metro, but there needs to be a seismic shift in how we think about it, because commuting is only going to continue to decline in the long term, even if it will bounce a bit in the short term. I'm hoping DC can find a way to incentivize development around metro stops to make metro better for locals rather than M-Fers that the Post keeps insisting are responsible for subsidizing the city through lunches and happy hours. That includes repurposing half empty office buildings, and maybe looking at relaxing the height restriction as you get further out of the city center.
The problem is that Amtrak doesn't own most or even any of those rails, instead having to pay for the right to use them. The reason why this is a problem is that it's hard to upgrade rails to high speed when you don't own them. Amtrak trains also often have to stop and give passage to freight trains, which is unlike what you'd see in Japan where passenger trains are on their own, dedicated rails.
Flying is such a miserable experience from start to finish that I would opt for rail every time if it was viable, even if it took 3-4 times as long.
The problem today is that it's an order of magnitude longer. Chicago to LA by airplane is 4 hours. Chicago to LA via Amtrak is about 56 hours. I don't know that high speed rail is going to fix that problem, sure it might get it down some, but even a 24 hour train is six times longer than flying.
I say this as someone that takes Amtrak at every opportunity because I enjoy trains and want to see them become viable for more people.
You’re looking at it from a coast to coast perspective when it should really be an intra-state one.
People aren’t regularly traveling from Chicago to La on a daily basis, even by plane. They are traveling within the same state or to nearby states instead.
Dallas-Houston, SF-LA, Miami-Orlando are all distances that people have to drive/fly to on a daily basis that could easily be replaced by hsr.
I don't disagree, regional high speed is where it's gotta start.
In Europe it considered the worst PT. Bus once a day on a tiny island? Sounds insane. Japan still base their PT operation on schedules instead of intervals.
No... Even regular intercity train Moscow-Belgorod train makes about 5 stops in regional centers. High-speed like Sapsan(or a lot of similar trains) that stops only on last stop 650 km apart.