To get the votes for the project from Western states you have to OK pork barrel projects there, the Western states aren't going to do so for free.
How to keep trains as popular in North America as they are in Europe
Because just like in the East, their is also infrastructure that has to be built and maintained out west.
Not nearly as much. Wyoming doesn't need as many roads, bridges, rails etc. as NY. However, if you want their vote along with every other Western state you damn well need to provide a good deal of money to those nowhere places. So you wind up building roads from Nowhere, Idaho to Who Cares, Idaho which no one will use and you will have to do so for hundreds of projects. HSR is expensive! Fund it through a NEC authority and you won't have to do so. You will get it far cheaper, quite likely for the people of NY itself because they aren't funding nonsense projects in Nevada.
The Feds are the ones with the actioual money though. They are the ones who can very easily bankroll HSR.
marathag
Banned
Biggest swing was on February 2nd 1970, of 72 degrees for the State record.isn't that sometimes at the same day?
For Rochester, MN in the far SE of the State
Rank Date Change
---- ---- -----------
1 May 5 1909 58 degrees (High 90 Low 32)
2 February 12 1939 56 degrees (High 38 Low -18)
3 February 26 1940 55 degrees (High 27 Low -28)
4 February 11 1934 54 degrees (High 34 Low -21)
5 October 18 1939 53 degrees (High 73 Low 20)
6 January 20 1937 52 degrees (High 32 Low -20)
7 February 23 1918 52 degrees (High 52 Low 0)
8 January 29 2008 52 degrees (High 40 Low -12)
9 December 24 1949 51 degrees (High 34 Low -17)
10 February 27 1935 50 degrees (High 28 Low -22)
January 18 1996 50 degrees (High 45 Low - 5)
March 20 1934 50 degrees (High 69 Low 19)
May 2 1918 50 degrees (High 78 Low 28)
The states have plenty of money to do it, they just don't want to.
They could do so but choose not to . They could cut spending in other areas or raise taxes if it was that important to them but it isn't. Push comes to shove HSR is not very important for most people. If it were it would be done.
How to keep trains as popular in North America as they are in Europe?
Have publicly financed elections.
It is money in politics, the ability of car makers to legally bribe politicians that have created the deficit in public transport in the US. Without money in politics, the government probably would have invested more into public transportation including the railway, especially for a big country as the US.
The question is about North America but I see the root cause as the lack of investment in the US, which has its root cause from money in politics.
Nonsense. its size is a big reason it doesn't make sense. Unless you live in the NEC a HSR system benefits you not at all and is just a needless expense. You aren't going to persuade some guy in Iowa to help pay for a multi-hundred billion dollar system he will never use. It doesn't even make sense to the people in the NEC or they would fund it themselves.
The farmer in Iowa might agree if the rider in New York buys and eats the food he grows. Same for the guy in Wyoming who digs the coal the Easterners burn for power. It's all a matter of how producer states view marketing and economics.
The rider in NY is going to buy the food and power plants are going to buy the coal whether or not the rider in NY goes by car or HSR. The only difference is that the guy in Wyoming isn't going to help pay for it if it is by car. We are talking about passenger rail not freight. That has about zero impact outside the area it is serving. Freight is different. It is easier for the farmer in Iowa to sell corn in NY if there is rail going to NY to make it cheaper. Same thing with the coal. But those are FREIGHT trains not passenger trains.
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and yet, and yet ... the reason why it's quicker to walk ... is that the London streets are full of cars (and busses and trucks and cabs and cyclists .
(i.e. people will still take their cars EVEN IF by doing so it leads to such congestion that means it's quicker to walk
None of this is true though, as it is known that even in some US cities transit riders have higher average satisfaction with their commute than car drivers do:
And in most other cities with more transit, it is usually noted that traffic is not particularly different than in similar US cities, the transit is simply better planned and more convenient, and this attracts riders from cars more. If anything, US cities show a much higher rate of people using transit because every other option is worse than in other first-world cities, and yet their modal share is much lower (primarily because this leaves few people using US transit other than those who have to). Many of the below quoted comments focus on increasing transit convenience to increase ridership, not making cars less available or convenient. So the belief that transit is only used when everything else is made impractical is clearly false.https://ggwash.org/view/74027/dc-commuters-are-driving-less-and-using-transit-more
DC commuters are driving less and using transit more
TRANSIT By Stephen Hudson (Contributor) September 30, 2019 5
People's access to transit stops affects their commute decisions, a new survey from COG shows.
In recent years, there has been no shortage of bad news about local riders fleeing transit. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG), however, has published a report indicating that commuters are increasingly choosing transit or telework over driving.
Since 2007, COG has noted a gradual decline in the percentage of workers that drive alone, decreasing from 66.9% to 58.3%. Carpooling saw an even greater drop, decreasing from 7.1% to 4.6%. Transit, biking and walking, and teleworking, on the other hand, all had marked increases over the last 12 years.
Graph from page 33 of the report.
In total, nearly a quarter of commuters across the region reached work by transit, according to the report.
Unsurprisingly, the way people commute depends a lot on what part of the metropolitan region they live in. A plurality of commuters who live in the ‘inner core’ (DC, Arlington, and Alexandria) commute by transit. Likewise, 13% of commuters in the core area commute by bike, versus only 1% and 0% of commuters in the middle and outer rings, respectively.
Image from page 24 of the report.
Graph from page 38 of the report.
The COG report also touches on commuter satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, commuters with in the core of the region have shorter commutes and higher satisfaction with their commutes than those living farther outside of the center. Bike commuters reported the highest satisfaction with their commute by a wide margin, followed by bus commuters.
Metrorail commuters noted an increase in satisfaction since the 2016 survey, edging above a 50% satisfaction rate. Those commuting alone in a car, or in a car pool, reported the lowest satisfaction with their commute. Curiously, commuter train riders saw a large drop in satisfaction, plummeting from 90% in 2013 to 56% in 2019.
Graph from page 53 of the report.
Despite these positive signs, DC Councilmember Charles Allen noted that the region is still too car dependent, and good, accessible bus service is an important equity issue.
Charles Allen
✔@charlesallen
· Sep 18, 2019
At Transportation Planning Board today, State of Commute report was shared. For the region, **63% drive alone**. While avg travel length remains the same since 2004, avg travel timeby 26%. Just one of the many reasons we must invest more in regional transit choices.
Charles Allen
✔@charlesallen
Let’s also look at transit equity. The report finds middle & low-income working families use the bus twice the rate of other income groups. So when WMATA raises bus fares at 2x the rate of rail fares - like it did 2 years ago - it directly hurts those least able to afford it.
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1:43 PM - Sep 18, 2019
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Charles Allen
✔@charlesallen
Replying to @charlesallen
The finding that should be no surprise at all is that the distance of your home from a bus stop or metro station is directly correlated to whether you choose that transit option. If we want to grow transit ridership, we have to invest & expand bus/rail access closer to home.
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Another interesting tidbit is that it appears that residents under 35 appear to be moving away from car-free and car light households. Though this decrease is not encouraging, several commentators have also noted the connection between higher income and higher car ownership. Conversely, this trend could be linked to the fact that younger residents are being priced out of walkable and transit-friendly neighborhoods.
What else have you noticed in the report?
In other first-world cities, transit modal share is rarely above 20%, but that's many times higher than it is in most US cities and more than enough to support the transit network. This won't apply to as big a fraction of US cities as other cities, and one response to the below quoted comments asked about Lafayette which wasn't as dense as the European city used as a model, but it does apply to many large US cities, certainly enough for transit to form a much larger fraction of transport in the US than it does now:
Any transit better planned and built like this in the last 50 years would have provided much higher ridership. This doesn't even get into HSR, which as mentioned earlier outcompetes short-haul air travel by itself on shorter denser routes.
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One does not need to convince everyone, this is an infrastructure investment, and public transportation investment, if one had publicly financed elections, then the automobile industry would not be able as easily to "persuade" the politicians to minimize public transportation. Which would make trains more popular in the US, which achieves the goal of the thread.
marathag
Banned
Politicians didn't have to sweetalk their constituents into wanting roads from place to place. Or get paid under the table by 'Big Auto' which wasn't so big when the roadbuilding movement took hold
In 1913, the State of Iowa was 6th in Automobile registrations.
There wasn't a paved road between two towns in that State til 1918
People wanted Roads to use their new cars, and they didn't want Toll Roads.
How better to gain favor than by bringing some Pork Barrel spending in.
At this time, recall, John Q Public despised the Railroad Companies from all the handouts they got thru the 1890's or so.
A Pol Promising RR expansion being good for the locals would have been looked on with serious distrust.
Public Roads?
That was for _Them_ and their new cars, not some Fatcat Railroad Baron
That the RR companies were as of WWI being strangled by the ICC, gained them no sympathy
You might get busses , trams and subways more popular as people will use those. Practically no one in Wyoming , Montana or Idaho would ever use intercity passenger rail as there is no way they are going to those nowhere places. Almost no one outside the NEC would use intercity passenger rail so why would they be willing to pay for it?
You folks seam to lose site of something. The US HAD a very good passenger rail system that was dependable relatively in expensive as high tech as anywhere and covered most of the country.
And it was lucky to break even and folks who had access to it chose NOT to use it when given other options. So why would folks choose differently today?
As I repeatedly point out. Even in Europe the roads are packed with cars. So even in Europe if driving does not suck or cost to much.. people choose cars.
And it was lucky to break even and folks who had access to it chose NOT to use it when given other options. So why would folks choose differently today?
As I repeatedly point out. Even in Europe the roads are packed with cars. So even in Europe if driving does not suck or cost to much.. people choose cars.
The low density of American cities is a problem too. This is partly zoning laws and that is politics.
How big the country is also a problem. East coast to west coast is just too slow for trains.
I suspect keeping lobbying money out of politics in America would be an even bigger project than making trains popular with people in America.
Publicly funded elections - Wikipedia
K Street (Washington, D.C.) - Wikipedia
As I have said before, sleeper cars were the primary means of long-distance travel in 1950. Then jets came along in the late fifties, changing travel. It is conceivable that rail service could have contracted to move people from small cities to big cities and airports, using schemes already in place. Rail spurs take much less right-of-way than highways, yet we went full speed ahead with highways. It would have taken an Amtrak concept in the early fifties to reform passenger rail use and there was no support from rails, passengers or government to make it happen. You might see HSR evolve in limited corridors in future decades, but that would not be part of keeping passenger rails alive after the fifties.
There is the argument that large rail terminals do not have space for the parking that now surrounds large airports. That is because travel evolved to car and air. Where did people park or get to the train stations in 1950? That's where the evolution would need to diverge.
There is the argument that large rail terminals do not have space for the parking that now surrounds large airports. That is because travel evolved to car and air. Where did people park or get to the train stations in 1950? That's where the evolution would need to diverge.