They already have that. Well, it's not really a "high-speed tram," and it doesn't shuttle people between different tourist attractions, but it does support a (for the U.S.) relatively high-speed rail service, privately-owned and funded, which is expected to be extended to link to Orlando in the near future and possibly Tampa afterwards. It's not about tourists, who aren't really a good passenger base, but just the sheer number of people in the state.
AHC: The US with a high speed rail system as prolific as in East Asia or western Europe
- Thread starter Mitchell Hundred
- Start date
A lot of goods pass over the plains on the interstate highways, and most roads are state owned and built. Cheaper goods transport benefits everyone as they pay less for goods. Passenger trains benefit no one but the handful of riders that use them. Most roads in Kansas are built by the Kansas State Government. You assume I think that the US should support tiny airports, I don't. If Kansas wants an airport that handles less than 100 people a day Kansas should pay for it. The Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway carries goods not people (same thing with the interstate) and thus can pay for itself. Passenger trains carry nothing but passengers. Someone in NY probably benefits somewhat from cheaper shipping (everything is interlinked these days) but someone in Alabama benefits squat from someone in NY being able to see his family an extra 1/2 hour a day.
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I very much doubt a national HSR network is economical in the US in the Jet Age, but could see more regional network of rail lines surviving and thriving if managed properly. The big issue is that cars are ubiquitous, fast, and cheap to drive, so you'd need to do something about that. Perhaps in a scenario where there's no Cold War a comprehensive federally funded interstate highway system like we got OTL just never develops due to lack of political support. Consequently cities remain less suburbanized, and with medium distance travel by car being somewhat more painful due to increased stops and state toll roads rail lines are able to continue to fill that niche, while the airlines take over long distance travel. Eventually things fall into a pattern where cars dominate short-range travel, rail dominates medium travel (say a trip from Cincinnati to Columbus), and air regional travel.
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The Interstate Highway System was as much about Joe Six-pack using roads a lot as for defense, probably more. They probably would have been built eventually, maybe delayed five years.
It's almost as if roads move more than just people...
Roads open markets and allow access to resources. If your state produces anything it's in your state's interest to make the Feds ensure that Cletus of Nowheresville Oklahoma is able to buy it.
The same can't be said of dedicated passenger lines. Hence why earlier in the thread I suggested leaving the matter to an RDA.
One area where the US passenger rail infrastructure being improved would be hugely impactful would be heavy rapid transit and other urban (I.e. commuter) rail; shiny bullet train proposals Miss the forest for the trees, because as others have pointed out we’d get bang for buck just by having passenger rail that could do 125-150 mph on average in several key corridors. Note that outside of a handful of ICE lines this is how the German rail system operates; TGV/Shinkansen is a relative outlier worldwide.
Electrified, frequent through-run commuter rail would be transformative, though, to say nothing of the effects of grade separated heavy rapid transit like subways. Imagine the LIRR and NJT through running at 10 minute headways as a consolidated unit, or the MBTA being electrified. An S-Bahn style urban rail infrastructure would be much more hugely beneficial, and for more Americans, than HSR that would struggle to compete with jet travel
Electrified, frequent through-run commuter rail would be transformative, though, to say nothing of the effects of grade separated heavy rapid transit like subways. Imagine the LIRR and NJT through running at 10 minute headways as a consolidated unit, or the MBTA being electrified. An S-Bahn style urban rail infrastructure would be much more hugely beneficial, and for more Americans, than HSR that would struggle to compete with jet travel
Agreed, commuter rails for metro areas make much more sense than interstate passenger rail.
Which is, guess what, why I pointed out not one but three alternate ways of moving goods, not people: the (existing) U.S. Highways, the (existing) railway network, or the (existing) water shipping network. All of which would have required much less investment on the part of the federal government than the Interstates do, in part because all of them already existed. Face it, the Interstates are just as much of a money-losing subsidization of particular interests as a high-speed rail system would be. It's just that they've already been built and so look "natural".
Yes, but I wasn't talking about "most roads"--and specifically said that most roads were state funded--I was talking about federally funded roads, i.e. the Interstates, which are heavily funded by the federal government. Goods could travel almost as well via state-funded and state-built U.S. Highways with no or almost no federal funding, certainly a lot less than the Interstates.
The problem is that you are making an argument about why the federal government will not fund high-speed rail, not about why they should not. The fact of the matter is that the federal government will fund a lot of infrastructure designed to move people (not goods) and which benefits people in particular localities (not everywhere in the country).
The Tennesse-Tombigbee does not pay for itself, actually. Maybe in wider economic impact, but in terms of direct usage fees, no way. In fact, I specifically picked it because it was, even at the time, extremely controversial outside of Mississippi and Tennessee, with a great deal of questioning of whether the economic justifications were accurate (they were not; they grossly overestimated how much traffic would travel along the canal), and it definitely was not a project that any private investor would have built. In short, it was precisely a project that under your own criteria the federal government should not have funded.
Of course they do. Someone seeing his family an extra 1/2 hour per day means that other people can see the same commute but move slightly further out, into cheaper land, and keep the same commute. That in turn allows them to spend a bit more money, some of which will go to goods like cars that people in Alabama build. Additionally, the extra economic activity stemming from easier transport around New York means more tax money, some of which will be reinvested in Alabama. Essentially, Alabamans have the same reason to want to build high-speed rail in New York that they do in wanting any increase in economic activity anywhere in the country.
Did you actually think this was a functional counter argument?
Yes, the existing interstate network makes a good compliment to the existing highways, the existing waterways, and the existing railways. They are all of immense economic value to America as a whole. The same can't be said of the non-existent and passenger exclusive HSR network.
The main problem with most HSR proposals today is that their planners have ambitions for something that rivals the Shinkansen. When a more practical, achievable solution would be to use British mainline railroads, and apply their tactics to various selected regions of the country. Or, embracing something more akin to the Steel Interstate Initiative in various, high-traffic railroad areas, like around Chicago or from Atlanta to Raleigh, for example.
I thought it was fairly obvious that I was talking about the situation in the 1950s, when the Interstate network didn't exist. At the time, the railroads, U.S. Highways, and water transport did exist, and could transport goods just fine. So by the arguments being advanced in this thread, there was no need to spend boatloads of federal cash on building new Interstates. If Kansans wanted to transport goods better, they should have just upgraded their U.S. Highways instead of sucking at the federal teat, etc. etc.
Of course there's no economic benefit to a non-existent HSR network, but observations of other countries show that it would have significant economic value to the United States if it did exist and was built out.
True that there was support for building highways, but without the Cold War boosting support for government spending and the conservatives in congress being brought on board with "we can use it to rapidly put down any commie uprisings!" there would be less of a stomach for such a big federal spending program. The longer it takes to get highways off the ground and less resources put into expanding their access and making them easy and free to use, the more breathing room passenger rail in the US has.
Devvy
Donor
Let's be honest, we have the same arguments and debates between the same people every time this comes up. Things I think we can all agree on:
- A nationwide HSR scheme is never going to happen.
- A regional scheme is possible; not least because one already exists in Acela, and a few other areas have at least some potential.
- Operationally I think it would probably cover costs, but I don't think there's any doubt that for building high speed rail schemes, the construction cost would never be paid back from revenues. Whether that's worth the public subsidy will differ depending on your political viewpoints.
- Building "true" high speed rail is very unlikely; modernising existing rail alignments (ie. to allow passenger expresses to overtake freight trains using quad-track) is probably a far better use of money, or electrification, or new signalling systems, alignment infrastructure replacements (bridge or grade crossing replacements).
- Or forgetting high speed rail as a political nightmare (even if technically and logistically not difficult), and focussing on improving regional transit. As @KingSweden24 noted, operationally combining the LIRR and NJT would vastly improve transit in NJ/NY area, reduce platform requirements at Penn Station, reduce station congestion as more trains per hour could operate through the combined tunnel, and improve access to Newark and JFK Airports (as well as general east-west connections) - for virtually no money in the grand scheme of things for some trackwork adjustments at Penn Central.
This is what I was largely thinking of doing for my own rail TL ideas. Or, we could use that Steel Interstate thing I posted as a model to create said quadruple-track mainline, with two tracks for passenger rail, another two for freight.
Except that's not the point being advanced in this thread... We're all talking about how systems that move goods benefit the entire national economy, and how the same cannot be said of systems that exclusively move people. You seem to be missing that nuance entirely in your efforts to equate HSR to the Interstate System.
The data indicates that it would benefit the area served, which is not the same thing as benefiting the entire USA.
That's because that nuance doesn't exist. Transporting goods is not a magic spell that makes a system always economically justified, or else there wouldn't have been nearly so many bankrupt railroads and canals in the 19th century. Certainly if you specify particular criteria for what makes a system economically justified you will find projects that are not justifiable under those criteria. And by the criteria that you two have specified--to wit, as I said, that projects have to carry massive amounts of traffic and connect everywhere in the country--the Interstates would have failed when they were evaluated in the 1950s, since most Interstate miles carry relatively little traffic, hardly more than comparable state-funded non-Interstate routes.
See, for instance, Montana's traffic from 2018 to pick a random example. Traffic volumes on Interstates in rural areas are generally high but comparable to those on the busier "principal arterials - other rural," mostly U.S. Highways. Ergo, there was no reason to build Interstates in those areas, because U.S. Highways could transport similar quantities of goods. And if you're not going to build Interstates in those areas, then there is no reason to build them anywhere, since such a cut-down network wouldn't benefit every state. Ergo, no reason to build them at all. Again, by your own criteria, and only looking at goods transport (though the numbers don't break out what fraction of vehicles are trucks versus cars).
Of course it benefits the entire U.S. The U.S. includes the areas being served, so anything that benefits the parts benefits the whole unless it hurts other parts as much or more than it benefits the parts that it benefits. And what's being asked for here is a few dozen to a few hundred dollars per year in tax money on average, hardly the end of the world.
ShySusan
Gone Fishin'
I just want to point out that this is not even remotely accurate. My husband is a truck driver, and having to take US Routes adds hours to his trip and drastically reduces the number of miles per day that he can cover. On the interstate, he can drive between 650 and 700 miles per day. On a US Route, maybe 5-550. It also increases the amount of diesel he uses because of the constant start-stop nature of the road. So no, goods cannot travel "almost as well" on back roads. Oh, they also tend to be in much worse condition than the Interstate, and that increases the wear and tear on his truck, which increases the amount of maintenance he needs, which increases costs.