There is an extremely glaring problem with this map: topography.
The route from LA to Seattle, with the branch additional bay-area line, has to deal with the following:
1. The tehachapi mountains, where the current rail line can handle up to 40 freight trains per day. This line is at capacity and cannot handle anything more. Worse even, it is mostly single track with steep grades and sharp curves. No regular passenger trains have run over it since the late 70's. In order to put a high-speed line here, it would cost billions, requiring many long tunnels through solid rock, along with large bridges and fills.
2: The Sacramento River Canyon, north of Redding. This is the only workable pass up to the Klamath River drainage, and quite frankly is extremely tough to pass. It has many tight curves, has had plenty of washouts and is a very steep grade past Dunsmuir. The I-5 alignment goes up and down and up, while taking up the only side of the canyon which can handle a right-of-way. There is no other option to get north, so this is pretty much right out.
3: The Siskiyou mountains, or the cascade mountains, to make it to Eugene. Both of them have rail lines, again with many sharp curves and steep grades. The Siskiyou line is absolutely brutal, which caused the Southern Pacific (the original owner, bought by the Union Pacific in 1996) to sell it off to RailTex. It handles 1 through train daily and is prone to washouts and landslides. The Cascade line is also single track, rough and at capacity. No other passes which can accomodate a line with moderate grades and few curves exist, requiring another expensive series of tunnels.
So, that one is pretty much a wash, as you can tell.
The route to San Diego from LA is already very good with high speeds (90MPH), but for whatever reason they want to route it through San Bernadino. This is absolutely stupid, as the route would follow I-15 and is already extremely rough with many changes in elevation and no consistent routing. There was a previous Santa Fe rail line through here that was promptly abandoned once they built the Surfliner route along the coast.
The route from LA to Denver is a pipe dream, sadly, due to:
1: Cima Hill, which runs through Mojave National Preserve. The only way across is along the existing Union Pacific alignment, which has several nasty curves.
2: The Wasatch Mountains. There is no good pass here outside Soldier Summit, which is rather brutal. Look it up to see what I mean.
3. The Rocky Mountains. You want to put a railroad through that? Go north through echo canyon and across the continental divide in Wyoming. That is the only HST viable route there, wide open for the taking.
The route from New Mexico to Denver is mostly owned by the state of New Mexico and Amtrak, but suffers from the beast that is Raton Pass. 3% grades, very tight curves and lots of general unpleasantness south of Trinidad. The lead up to it is nice, flat and high-speed, but the pass itself is nasty.
I could keep going, but I think the point has been made. Maps are all well and good, but what rules HST design is topography vs. budget. In order to do like the Japanese and punch a line down rough land, you have to spend gobs of cash and years of effort. With tight budgets and a booming national debt, it isn't really an option.
However, the Northeast Corridor is an excellent place, and several other routes across the midwest are also great candidates, should there be traffic to support them. Chicago-NYC would be a very good one, as the route has high demand and can follow water-level routes with gentle grades and few curves.
What makes HST succeed is either great land for it (France) or $$$ (Japan, China) or both in spades (Germany). I want to see it happen, but we have to restrict it to where it makes sense. Those routes are:
1: Chicago/Great-Lakes to NYC
2: LA to San Diego (the surfliner would be packed if the trip was on an HST)
3: Boston-NYC-DC-Richmond. Replace the Acela with something faster on a grade-separated alignment.
4: Texas to Kansas City - this is seriously one of the best places around for HST. Nice, flat, open and fast.
5: Eugene to Seattle. Only tough thing is crossing the Columbia river as the existing rail bridge is at capacity and has a 35mph slow order.
6: Florida. They just need to bite the bullet and do it.
It seems you assume that existing rail lines would be put to use for a high-speed train. I doubt that would be the case. Amtrak shares lines with freight but it's also limited to the speed of freight. I suspect the logistics of jostling trains to passing lines would eliminate the usefulness of a high-speed train.
Also, there's not a logistical or technical problem with punching through hills and mountains when needed. Definitely a financial problem, but if you're gonna spend trillions building this thing, what's an extra few million to bore holes in rock? ;-)
I think a lot of the HST skeptics would do well to spend some time in the northeast. In just 10 years, Amtrak has captured 75% of the traffic between NYC and DC, and over 50% of the traffic between NYC and Boston. It's phenomenal. At my office, nobody takes flights between NYC/PHL/DC anymore. Why go out to LaGuardia when you can walk over to Penn Station, enjoy WiFi and a ton of leg room, not to mention a snack car, and get there in about the same amount of time as flying? Oh, and you're dropped off right in downtown DC, instead of Reagan or in the god forsaken suburbs if you're unlucky enough to land in Dulles.
And Amtrak isn't even very good! Years of neglect and bad regulation have left the service with old cars (except Acela), crumbling infrastructure, etc. But it beats the hell out of air travel, and the differential will only get more dramatic as fuel prices continue to increase.
"I think a lot of the HST skeptics would do well to spend some time in the northeast"
Taking "the northeast" to be New England + New York + Pennsylvania + New Jersey, it covers ~135,000 square miles and has a population of ~56 million people.
New Mexico alone has an area of ~121,000 square miles and has only ~2 million people.
As a skeptic, I look at the northeast, and say that may be the one place in the country it makes sense to have high speed rail because of the population density, and close proximity of the major cities.
Sure would be nice if the prices were more competitive. You can still get in & out of DC round trip for about half the price of a one-way Acela trip (from Boston). Not worth the premium in most cases... but I want to like it!
I can't help but be skeptical when it costs from 3-7 times more than the bus and is only 20-30 minutes shorter of a trip. Of course, it's far more comfortable, but for a 3-5 hr trip, the trade-off is well worth it.
Another reason to be skeptical is that the longest existing HST line is still only 1/2 as long as the distance from NYC to Los Angeles. If the USA is really interested in country wide coverage like that, it would be unprecedented.
You're right, Amtrak in the Northeast isn't very good. It's the only mode of transportation that completely prohibits carriage of bicycles. And simultaneously one of the few major rail services in the world to do so.
I think that the high-speed rail map that the Obama Administration put up on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) website is a little more close to a tenable future.
It highlights the boston-washington route (NEC on the map or BosWash some like to say[1]), which seems to be easily the most do-able route in the near future, in terms of people served.
I like it. The idea, I mean. But its hard to get people to come around to spending money on anything remotely like this seems. I think all societies should have very lofty goals published and promoted often[2], but I think at the same time we need to always provide concrete reality-scale plans when trying to make the argument to non-believers, which is why I prefer the ARRA map, or something even smaller.
I think there are some larger societal issues that affect the value of things like this too. I wish Americans would (could) travel more, and see what other developed countries are like.
[2] "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea" -Antoine de Saint Exupéry
I wish Americans would (could) travel more, and see what other developed countries are like.
If they did this, they would realize why high speed rail makes sense in other developed countries but not in the US. Most other developed countries are tiny.
Aomori-Kagoshima (top of Japan to bottom) - 1928 km.
London-Moscow - 2885km.
Paris, France to Mosul, Iraq - 4522km.
NY-LA - 4469km.
And unlike the NY-LA route, all of the routes I mentioned have a lot of destinations in between the endpoints. For example, on the Paris-Mosul route you find Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Syria. Between NY and LA there are Omaha, Chicago, Pittsburg, Cleveland, Denver and Vegas.
Even the short London-Moscow route passes through Antwerp, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Warsaw and Minsk.
The problem with the Obama map is that it still suffers from the same problem as the one posted: topography.
It is more a map to appease voters, without bearing into mind the cost of building it. If you look at it and go "oh wow, I can go from LA to SF up the coast", you of course can't tell that it would be madly expensive to build.
This is a little ridiculous. High-speed rail in the United States will never be feasible on a country-wide scale. It's just not necessary or logical.
14 hours across the country—or even 8 hours at nearly twice the viable speed—will never match the speed or efficiency of air travel.
High speed rail can compete in the regional corridors where it makes sense. And it should. But the United States is huge. It's not Europe. We shouldn't expect this or desire it.
There's two physical factors working against air travel here:
1) it's much less cost-effective to make a flight comfortable, in terms of leg room, food, space to walk around, than a train trip; this difference only gets bigger as liquid fuel prices go up;
2) as a practical matter you can't build airports in the heart of urban centers.
If there was a 14 hour train between NYC and LA, with the leg room and amenities of existing Amtrak trains, I think it would give air travel a run for its money. Taking a cab to LaGuardia takes about half an hour from Manhattan, and it's like a $40 cab ride. Another half an hour in LA, probably $50+ cab ride. Add at least an hour at the airport for each scenario, plus the 4-5 hours of actual travel time, and you're looking at an 8 hour trip.
Would you rather have 8 hours of cab -> airport -> airplane -> airport -> cab, or 14 hours just walking from a downtown train station, onto a train, and out of another downtown train station? Would you rather spend 5 hours crammed into an economy class seat, or 14 hours in an Amtrak train with a ton of leg room, where you can get up, go to the snack car, etc?
Outside the NE corridor, any significant amount of rail is a pipe dream. Why spent trillions to provide service that planes are already providing more than enough service to? At least I can take a plane from here to wherever I want in the United States. Rail? Oh, I'd have to travel to the nearest station (potentially hours away) and then hope it goes anywhere near where I want to go. And judging based on that map, it will go near maybe 5% of the locations I'd like to go.
And the linked article doesn't seem to take into account the massive operating subsidies that rail requires. It's a money loser nearly everywhere (except, sometimes, in the NE corridor).
"In 1970, the year before Amtrak took over the nation's passenger trains, average rail fares were about one-third less than average airfares—about 18 cents (in today's pennies) versus 27 cents per passenger mile. Four decades of Amtrak management have reversed this ratio and more: by 2011, average rail fares were 110 percent greater than airfares—about 28.5 cents versus 13.8 cents
per passenger mile (see Figure 1)." [1]
Theres quite a bit of back and forth, but the main conclusion is that the market for HSR won't support one. It seems in most cases people would rather fly, or the distance is short enough that a HSR doesn't make any sense.
It's a nice map, but it elides over the difficult parts of high-speed rail in the US. Running track through rural areas is easy, modulo getting across the Rockies and the Sierras. The hard part is routing through urban areas. Look at the Los Angeles and New York "stations". They cover the entire metro areas. Same with San Francisco. No one wants to be forced to sell their house to the government for high-speed rail, but without new dedicated track carved deep into the hearts of our urban areas, it will never compete with air travel.
It accommodates the state of the track (in most cases). To go faster would require wholesale replacement of most existing track, which is thought to be too expensive (but is the approach that was used in Japan and France).
> That's at least 12 hours to get from New York to Los Angeles.
I think many people would accept that, if the price was reasonable and the cars had suitable accommodations.
It would be excellent to have high-speed rail in the southeast, in the Atlanta-Raleigh ("I-85") crescent. This region will eventually be a major urban agglomeration, and improved transit would help its future immensely, as well as the development of the secondary cities along the route. Raleigh, Charlotte, and Atlanta are doing fine; but the Upstate (South Carolina) and Piedmont Triad (North Carolina) could use some help, and being more integrated with the overall region would make a lot of sense.
Here is why high speed rail in the US and Canada is stupid.
NY to SF: 2500 miles.
London to Moscow: 1500.
People who live between NY and SF: 313 million.
People who live between London and Moscow: 731 million.
The economics of it are completely backward, and you can't take high speed rail from London all the way to Moscow.
We'd be much better off to start by improving I80 and just wait for driverless cars (busses) to go 250 mph.
Also, yes, high speed rail in the sprawl (Boswash) makes sense, but it doesn't really make much sense anywhere else except for maybe Seattle to LA. Linking the coasts with high speed rail is probably pretty silly unless you can start getting close to 350-450 mph.
You don't have to link NY to SF. High-speed rail in the U.S. makes the most sense for linking the mega-regions. Chicago to Montreal is less than twice the distance from Bordeaux to Strasbourg and hits much bigger cities along the way. Birmingham, AL to Raleigh, NC is about the same distance hits similar sized metro areas.
Also: the fact that cars are driverless doesn't change the physics of 250 mph cars...
[+] [-] kposehn|13 years ago|reply
The route from LA to Seattle, with the branch additional bay-area line, has to deal with the following:
1. The tehachapi mountains, where the current rail line can handle up to 40 freight trains per day. This line is at capacity and cannot handle anything more. Worse even, it is mostly single track with steep grades and sharp curves. No regular passenger trains have run over it since the late 70's. In order to put a high-speed line here, it would cost billions, requiring many long tunnels through solid rock, along with large bridges and fills.
2: The Sacramento River Canyon, north of Redding. This is the only workable pass up to the Klamath River drainage, and quite frankly is extremely tough to pass. It has many tight curves, has had plenty of washouts and is a very steep grade past Dunsmuir. The I-5 alignment goes up and down and up, while taking up the only side of the canyon which can handle a right-of-way. There is no other option to get north, so this is pretty much right out.
3: The Siskiyou mountains, or the cascade mountains, to make it to Eugene. Both of them have rail lines, again with many sharp curves and steep grades. The Siskiyou line is absolutely brutal, which caused the Southern Pacific (the original owner, bought by the Union Pacific in 1996) to sell it off to RailTex. It handles 1 through train daily and is prone to washouts and landslides. The Cascade line is also single track, rough and at capacity. No other passes which can accomodate a line with moderate grades and few curves exist, requiring another expensive series of tunnels.
So, that one is pretty much a wash, as you can tell.
The route to San Diego from LA is already very good with high speeds (90MPH), but for whatever reason they want to route it through San Bernadino. This is absolutely stupid, as the route would follow I-15 and is already extremely rough with many changes in elevation and no consistent routing. There was a previous Santa Fe rail line through here that was promptly abandoned once they built the Surfliner route along the coast.
The route from LA to Denver is a pipe dream, sadly, due to:
1: Cima Hill, which runs through Mojave National Preserve. The only way across is along the existing Union Pacific alignment, which has several nasty curves.
2: The Wasatch Mountains. There is no good pass here outside Soldier Summit, which is rather brutal. Look it up to see what I mean.
3. The Rocky Mountains. You want to put a railroad through that? Go north through echo canyon and across the continental divide in Wyoming. That is the only HST viable route there, wide open for the taking.
The route from New Mexico to Denver is mostly owned by the state of New Mexico and Amtrak, but suffers from the beast that is Raton Pass. 3% grades, very tight curves and lots of general unpleasantness south of Trinidad. The lead up to it is nice, flat and high-speed, but the pass itself is nasty.
I could keep going, but I think the point has been made. Maps are all well and good, but what rules HST design is topography vs. budget. In order to do like the Japanese and punch a line down rough land, you have to spend gobs of cash and years of effort. With tight budgets and a booming national debt, it isn't really an option.
However, the Northeast Corridor is an excellent place, and several other routes across the midwest are also great candidates, should there be traffic to support them. Chicago-NYC would be a very good one, as the route has high demand and can follow water-level routes with gentle grades and few curves.
What makes HST succeed is either great land for it (France) or $$$ (Japan, China) or both in spades (Germany). I want to see it happen, but we have to restrict it to where it makes sense. Those routes are:
1: Chicago/Great-Lakes to NYC
2: LA to San Diego (the surfliner would be packed if the trip was on an HST)
3: Boston-NYC-DC-Richmond. Replace the Acela with something faster on a grade-separated alignment.
4: Texas to Kansas City - this is seriously one of the best places around for HST. Nice, flat, open and fast.
5: Eugene to Seattle. Only tough thing is crossing the Columbia river as the existing rail bridge is at capacity and has a 35mph slow order.
6: Florida. They just need to bite the bullet and do it.
[+] [-] delinka|13 years ago|reply
Also, there's not a logistical or technical problem with punching through hills and mountains when needed. Definitely a financial problem, but if you're gonna spend trillions building this thing, what's an extra few million to bore holes in rock? ;-)
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
And Amtrak isn't even very good! Years of neglect and bad regulation have left the service with old cars (except Acela), crumbling infrastructure, etc. But it beats the hell out of air travel, and the differential will only get more dramatic as fuel prices continue to increase.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|13 years ago|reply
Taking "the northeast" to be New England + New York + Pennsylvania + New Jersey, it covers ~135,000 square miles and has a population of ~56 million people.
New Mexico alone has an area of ~121,000 square miles and has only ~2 million people.
This matters. A lot.
[+] [-] NoPiece|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdouble|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jzwinck|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aheilbut|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonsarris|13 years ago|reply
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/High_Spee...
It highlights the boston-washington route (NEC on the map or BosWash some like to say[1]), which seems to be easily the most do-able route in the near future, in terms of people served.
I like it. The idea, I mean. But its hard to get people to come around to spending money on anything remotely like this seems. I think all societies should have very lofty goals published and promoted often[2], but I think at the same time we need to always provide concrete reality-scale plans when trying to make the argument to non-believers, which is why I prefer the ARRA map, or something even smaller.
I think there are some larger societal issues that affect the value of things like this too. I wish Americans would (could) travel more, and see what other developed countries are like.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boswash
[2] "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea" -Antoine de Saint Exupéry
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|13 years ago|reply
If they did this, they would realize why high speed rail makes sense in other developed countries but not in the US. Most other developed countries are tiny.
Aomori-Kagoshima (top of Japan to bottom) - 1928 km.
London-Moscow - 2885km.
Paris, France to Mosul, Iraq - 4522km.
NY-LA - 4469km.
And unlike the NY-LA route, all of the routes I mentioned have a lot of destinations in between the endpoints. For example, on the Paris-Mosul route you find Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Syria. Between NY and LA there are Omaha, Chicago, Pittsburg, Cleveland, Denver and Vegas.
Even the short London-Moscow route passes through Antwerp, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Warsaw and Minsk.
[+] [-] kposehn|13 years ago|reply
It is more a map to appease voters, without bearing into mind the cost of building it. If you look at it and go "oh wow, I can go from LA to SF up the coast", you of course can't tell that it would be madly expensive to build.
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
14 hours across the country—or even 8 hours at nearly twice the viable speed—will never match the speed or efficiency of air travel.
High speed rail can compete in the regional corridors where it makes sense. And it should. But the United States is huge. It's not Europe. We shouldn't expect this or desire it.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
1) it's much less cost-effective to make a flight comfortable, in terms of leg room, food, space to walk around, than a train trip; this difference only gets bigger as liquid fuel prices go up;
2) as a practical matter you can't build airports in the heart of urban centers.
If there was a 14 hour train between NYC and LA, with the leg room and amenities of existing Amtrak trains, I think it would give air travel a run for its money. Taking a cab to LaGuardia takes about half an hour from Manhattan, and it's like a $40 cab ride. Another half an hour in LA, probably $50+ cab ride. Add at least an hour at the airport for each scenario, plus the 4-5 hours of actual travel time, and you're looking at an 8 hour trip.
Would you rather have 8 hours of cab -> airport -> airplane -> airport -> cab, or 14 hours just walking from a downtown train station, onto a train, and out of another downtown train station? Would you rather spend 5 hours crammed into an economy class seat, or 14 hours in an Amtrak train with a ton of leg room, where you can get up, go to the snack car, etc?
[+] [-] jstalin|13 years ago|reply
And the linked article doesn't seem to take into account the massive operating subsidies that rail requires. It's a money loser nearly everywhere (except, sometimes, in the NE corridor).
"In 1970, the year before Amtrak took over the nation's passenger trains, average rail fares were about one-third less than average airfares—about 18 cents (in today's pennies) versus 27 cents per passenger mile. Four decades of Amtrak management have reversed this ratio and more: by 2011, average rail fares were 110 percent greater than airfares—about 28.5 cents versus 13.8 cents per passenger mile (see Figure 1)." [1]
[1]: www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA712.pdf
[+] [-] fleitz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemothekid|13 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/17nvfk/i_really_hope_t...
Theres quite a bit of back and forth, but the main conclusion is that the market for HSR won't support one. It seems in most cases people would rather fly, or the distance is short enough that a HSR doesn't make any sense.
[+] [-] secabeen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p1mrx|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lutusp|13 years ago|reply
It accommodates the state of the track (in most cases). To go faster would require wholesale replacement of most existing track, which is thought to be too expensive (but is the approach that was used in Japan and France).
> That's at least 12 hours to get from New York to Los Angeles.
I think many people would accept that, if the price was reasonable and the cars had suitable accommodations.
[+] [-] asthasr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleitz|13 years ago|reply
We'd be much better off to start by improving I80 and just wait for driverless cars (busses) to go 250 mph.
Also, yes, high speed rail in the sprawl (Boswash) makes sense, but it doesn't really make much sense anywhere else except for maybe Seattle to LA. Linking the coasts with high speed rail is probably pretty silly unless you can start getting close to 350-450 mph.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
Also: the fact that cars are driverless doesn't change the physics of 250 mph cars...
[+] [-] kposehn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonknee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashika|13 years ago|reply