16 Comments

High-speed rail is a niche product that is not viable in most countries. For the product to work there must be ample distance between stations - what is the point of accelerating a train to 200mph if it needs to stop in 15 minutes at another station? However, the further stations are separated, the more inconvenient it is to access the train. And how does one access the train? If one has a car then it very quickly becomes more convenient to drive to ones destination than to drive to a rail station to take a train to another rail station and then figure out how to get to where one actually needs to go. And once destinations are more than several hundred miles apart flying becomes the competitive option.

In the US not only is driving more convenient but taking the bus or shuttles between cities is more convenient than taking a train. One of the bizarre biases for trains is that buses and shuttles are discredited by the professional class. Along the I-95 corridor between DC and Boston this is especially odd since the train is no faster than the bus and taking the bus can be far less expensive!

At a certain level it is understandable how Americans romanticize trains and discredit highways. What is inexplicable is the ignoring of air travel as a good solution for fast, convenient, medium distance travel. Seems one reason we don't have "flying cars" is the experts and policymakers are too busy trying to make fast trains work where they will never be useful.

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High speed rail is perfect to connect agglomerations that are a few hundreds of kilometres away from each other. Then, it can operate economically and the travel time beats any competitor, including aircraft if you include the check-in/check-out time and the travel to the airport. It works great in Japan and many countries of Europe.

The best operating conditions probably exist in Japan, where the cities are in a nice line and population density is high, so track utilisation and thus amortisation is good.

Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Washington would is a great high speed rail opportunity too. Especially since high speed rail can stop in the city centre

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It's a niche product that doesn't work in most countries, except for France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Morocco, China, Taiwan...

I dunno, at some point you gotta admit maybe the problem isn't the product, it's america's inability to build infrastructure.

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Here's a 2017 article explaining that rail service is not working well in France:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20171123/the-numbers-that-show-frances-proud-rail-service-is-struggling

"14 percent

This figure reflects the rise in coach travel since 2011, which means long distance buses are the one form of transport that is booming in France. In 2015/16, since Emmanuel Macron freed up the economy to allow coach travel, traffic has risen 17 percent. Both rail and bus transport tails far behind cars in France which are responsible for 88 percent of journeys. Train journeys represent just 9.2 percent of all journeys."

And about the TGV the article explains:

"155km/h

That reflects the average speed of France's prestigious high speed TGV trains in France. So although the TGV - the pride of France's rail system can travel over 300 km/h as we are regularly reminded in adverts, the average speed of a journey is well below that. The reasons being the frequency of stops, which of course slows the trains down but also the fact that many TGVs run on normal train lines where the speed limit is 160 km/h."

Seems the TGV has a lot in common with America's Amtrak. Seems high-speed rail is the myth that endures across multiple cultures.

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TGV carries over 110 million people a year and is net profitable (and way cheaper than a highway network, especially given land costs). It's obvious average speed is lower than top speed, that's why it's called "top" speed.

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You can’t exclude the cost of highways and roads from the cost of the train entirely. The “last mile” from train station to destination is taken over the road, especially when density is such that most riders have to travel over a mile to get to the train.

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It's because there's not really a "luxury" market for intercity bus travel - people with that kind of money just take planes instead, and the US doesn't have discount airlines as cheap as those in Europe. So intercity bus ends up just being the cheapest form of travel for poorer travelers.

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Intercity bus travel had the creeps & weirdos problem in the early 90s (at least, my ex-wife rode Greyhound from SLC to Seattle, and said she would never do that again). Given the general deterioration of social conditions overall, I wouldn't expect the ride to be much better.

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The last couple of times I took Greyhound I likened it to aversion therapy. I would never do that again, either.

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The last time I took a train was in 1974, from SF to Portland, OR. It took 22 hours. I can drive it in 11 hours. The biggest problem trains have competing with air travel is construction and maintenance costs. Trains require track for every inch of the route; aircraft need a couple of miles of runway at each end of the flight, and in between they move on air, with is free and self-repairing after each plane's passage. That said, the US could have built high-speed rail networks spanning the entire continent for the $6 trillion we blew over the last two decades on Middle East wars, and the 5,000 service personnel who died there would still be alive if they had been construction workers instead. I guess the Military-Industrial Complex lobby is more persuasive than the high-speed rail lobby.

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IIRC Transcontinental passenger rail was basically never profitable just on ticket prices alone. Passenger trains only made profit because of mail contracts, and they still depended on the profits from freight trains running on the same tracks.

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Hyperloops looked promising until it came out that in order have safe distances between sleds at 600 mph you couldn't run many at the same time in the tube. Turned out it would be a very expensive travel option for the wealthy.

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I commend your proficiency at simultaneously writing in great detail and providing a general historical overview, especially given that an entire series could be written on the auto industry’s role in the decline of rail transportation in America.

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It might be out of scope for this series, but one thing I quibble with is using profitability as a measure of success. For one, it's not clear people are always comparing apples to apples when profit is invoked: that is, are operating profits being compared to other industries operating profits, etc. Secondly, transportation systems, especially when taken in isolation, don't pay for themselves; they usually require some subsidy and support from the government.

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That is an important consideration. Convenient, reliable, transportation is a desirable public good. At the same time, cost, and more importantly, the consumers willingness to bear cost, is an important indicator of overall economic utility of a transportation system. Americans are willing to spend a good amount of their own money to have a car - this indicates there is high value in personal auto transportation. Americans are less willing to spend their own money on "public transportation" unless their life situation demands it.

For long distance travel that would be served by high-speed rail, it is not at all obvious why passenger rail is so desirable that it warrants billions in public investment. Roads & Highways are much more flexible / useful than passenger rail and to my understanding they are no more expensive than rail. There seems to be a political angle to the support of passenger rail and that implies the investment is not based on what is best for society but rather what best rewards special interests.

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I think there is as well a lingering element of High Modernism, the philosophy that drove Colbert and Haussmann to create the boulevards in Paris, and that Jane Jacobs so ably opposed in the eastern US, and that James C. Scott deconstructed in "Seeing Like a State".

Railways make mobility "legible", to use Scott's term -- governments can observe and control it. I think observability and control have enduring appeal to administrators.

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