Europe or Japan were nice, but China was amazing. No pre-paid ticket, no planning just show up at the Shenzen train station the morning, arrive in Beijing in the evening on the other size of the country.[1]
Imagine freedom, the innovation, the improvement in quality of life if we could hop on a train in the morning NYC and arrive in SF at night for ~$100. I found the trains so much more comfortable than even flying first class. Seeing the countryside fly by at 350km/hr is worth the price alone. Americans have no idea what they're missing.
I get your point, but that's a slightly inconvenient comparison. Shenzhen - Beijing is ~1200 miles, SF - NY is ~2600 miles. At the highest passenger rail speeds out there, the trip would probably end up being 12-18 hours.
There are several hundred miles of very tall mountains in the way. Unless someone is contemplating a century long project to dig a tunnel, those miles will be taken at a crawl.
Heck, even the geography between NYC and Chicago--which would be potentially interesting based on crow flies distance and amount of travel--almost certainly makes HSR not viable.
Not really. Tokyo-Osaka is going to be a bit under $200 whichever way you might choose. Maybe rail is $30 cheaper but it's a 15% difference rather than say 50%+.
Infrastructure is expensive. For example, the project to upgrade state route 99 in California, which parallels the High Speed Rail tracks for about 130 miles, to Interstate standards was projected to cost $22 billion ten years ago [1]. A lot of the huge costs are from the infrastructure debt of refusing to pay for a rail network, and for destroying a lot of the network that was in place. The HSR system will give a lot of benefits for a substantial amount of the state in terms of giving a modern transit backbone.
Its a hell of a lot easier to fly over the dozens or hundreds of different landowners and jurisdictions than it is to convince each of them to allow you to build a giant railroad through them
The us rail infra was built when this wasn't an issue or could be solved by sending some heavies in or bribing the right people.
They're partnering with Japan National Railways and planning on running the N700-I Bullet total system (the international version of the Tokaido Shinkansen).
The landowner problem was much worse in Japan and Europe, but was overcome with cash and persuasion. The US rail construction problem is much more complicated and costly than that.
And it applies to urban rail where the right of way is entirely public just as much as high speed.
For short distances high-speed rail can be a good option, particularly in connecting neighboring cities (LA-SF, etc).
The problems with all these projects are cost: Simple back of envelope calculations show it to be (a) dubious, or (b) possibly criminal (ie. standard taxpayer ripoff to cronies).
$64B - do the quick math on that. Figure a 30 year return on investment earning 4% per year:
$2.2B payback per year + operating cost of what? So somewhere around $7M per day in revenues minimum?
How many riders per day and what is average ticket price to make $7M per day?
I think you will suddenly find there are cheaper, faster, better options.
Well, a flight from SFO to LAX is $70 if you book at least a couple weeks in advance. If you assume parity for the ticket price, you need to sell an average of 100,000 tickers/day. With 100 passengers per car and 10 cars per train, you would need 100 trains/day, full, in order to make the math work.
I agree that seems pretty dubious. Why on earth is infrastructure so expensive in the US?
It's less wasteful to spend $20 billion building a pointless wall on the Mexican border than the ~$40 billion in losses this rail is going to eat. I'm glad I'm not a California resident.
And the fastest if you take into consideration the fact that you can come to the train station less than 30 minutes in advance just hop in the train and travel downtown to downtown.
30 minutes in advance for a train? Sometimes I arrive a minutes in advance and just enter the train before it is continuing its journey. Happens when my connecting train had a delay.
In Switzerland, where the train schedule is stunningly efficient, you can do this very reliably. Check in and security procedures make this impossible with airports. Unfortunately, this is also an issue with international high speed trains (TGV) where there are queues and checks.
In Germany the issue is, there is enough money to plan and build motorways but not for train routes. Consequence is, that many routes are over capacity and cargo, local, and long distance trains share one track. The result is that one delayed train creates a wave of delays through the entire network.
Fortunately there are still a few hassle free international high speed trains in Europe. Travel between France and Germany isn't subject to any special security measures. You just get on the train. Sometimes the train stops at the border for a really quick check and that's it.
That works when it's a commuter train, but you can't plan on just showing up minutes before a high-speed train that assigns seats. Because you can't just hop on the next one.
That's most of the reason why you can't just show up at the gate of your airplane 5 minutes before they shut the doors.
Security is the only big difference. You gotta plan on it possibly taking 30 minutes.
It depends on the routing especially as you get to traveling over borders in Europe. It does seem to be steadily improving though. Just a few years ago, I was going from Dusseldorf to Paris and I was rather surprised that train really wasn't a very good option.
Today, as I go to whip that out as a counterexample, I see that Thalys would make a whole lot of sense vs. flying for me (though I don't know how door-to-door costs would compare).
The Marseille/Avignon area to Geneva, Frankfurt or pretty much anywhere in Germany is surprisingly frustrating. I can fly from Marseille to Frankfurt in barely an hour -- a train ends up eating most of the day.
The only time I take the train over flying in Europe is typically Avignon-Paris. Everywhere closer and it's faster to drive, anywhere further and it's faster to fly.
