Regular ass trains on steel tracks can go >200mph if built to spec. Suuuure, maglev can go even faster. But regular ass trains on steel tracks can actually be build on a realistic budget. Like in theory atleast. But before the US does something this sane they're gonna nuke themselves. idk
Maglev isn't even more expensive. High speed rails that are built "to spec" for 400 km/h are expensive as fuck. Trains are usually shorter but frequency is higher, so per passenger it roughly evens out.
The real deal breaker is the lack of compatibility. Can't ever run a maglev train on legacy rail while your high speed train can use the existing system to bridge gaps in the high speed network.
I don’t know why you would want compatibility. The Shinkansen is also always on their own track.
Air planes aren’t compatible with train tracks either, so if you look at it more from a perspective of what they’re trying to replace I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.
I think it’s also mainly the start up and build costs, I think the wear of the rails of high speed trains on wheels is very costly
So you can have your high speed trains run to more remote stations, limiting the amount of changes for passengers.
Took the train to Grenoble that way, which is quite comfortable with a direct connection from Paris.
Not more expensive? Hard to say because also nobody builds them! But I don't think there's any specification you could make today that could be met cheaper with maglev than with old school big iron.
Regular ass train gang. Let's stop trying to reinvent something that already works way better than whatever half ass bullshit you thought about for a couple hours.
We need a rail line that is strictly for commuters. Right now the rails are owned by freight companies so they prioritize freight over people. Yes we do have the infrastructure to initiate high speed rails, but those rails are used for objects not people.
Passengers is the term you mean, not commuters. I read the first sentence and thought you were going to suggest something that is only open to people coming from and going to work.
But yes, we need passenger rail that's exclusively passenger rail.
I don't know much about various train technologies, but surely that's going to cause massive wear and tear on the tracks and need to be serviced very often right? And any debris on the track is probably going to cause quite bad damage to the wheels too.
I don't know, but I feel like your "if built to spec" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, what kind of spec? Is that sort of quality realistic for a real-world installation? Exposed to the elements?
Maglev is definitely more expensive to build and probably to run, but it seems like it'd be far more reliable? And also a much smoother experience for those on-board?
And I feel like Maglev has much greater theoretical speed limits than typical contact tracks, as, well, we basically remove the friction between the wheel and the track?
Most industry nations around the world are running high speed trains by now. They're doing petty fine I'd say. China threw a ton of money into German maglev tech and there isn't really much to see still. There's a reason most countries gave up on it.
I reckon it'll be one of those things that was just ahead of it's time, I think the concept is sound, but other infrastructure to run it, energy, rare-earth mining, just isn't ready to keep up yet.
Japan is building a maglev line right now. But they have >60 years of experience with high speed rail and the whole concept is established. Even then its "only" about to be 400km to connect three major metropolian areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen
Still:
Construction is expected to cost over ¥9 trillion Japanese yen (approximately $82 billion USD) and commenced in 2014. The start date of commercial service is unknown,[...]The Nagoya–Osaka section was planned to be completed as late as 2045, but the date was moved to as early as 2037 following a loan from the Japanese government.
Chicago to New York are more like 1200km and major stops between them are like Cleveland and Toledo. Uuuh... just build regular ass rail with a bit higher specs for higher speeds...
Yeah, but investing in infrastructure pays out big for everyone....investing in war pays out bigger, and just for Trump and his buddies. Which would he choose?
In the end the maintenance cost for maglev vs bullet trains are about the same. Bullet trains focus more on mechanical maintenance of the track and wheels. While the maintenance of maglev is typically more technical, it requires constant recalibration of the electronics and constant monitoring for alignment.
Maglev is definitely more expensive to build and probably to run, but it seems like it'd be far more reliable? And also a much smoother experience for those on-board?
Traditional steel on rail is actually more reliable in practice. Theoretically the basic mechanics of maglev are more reliable, but in practice they tend to suffer from longer delays when they do fail. This is mostly because the repairs/maintenance for traditional rail can be done by just about anyone, where maglevs tend to be locked in by a single vendor contract.
Maglev has much greater theoretical speed limits than typical contact tracks, as, well, we basically remove the friction between the wheel and the track?
They are theoretically faster, but in practice the speed of trains are most often governed not by the limitations of the trains themselves, but instead are limited by the surrounding infrastructure and terrain.
The cruising speed of railed bullet trains are around 200mph, while the cruising speeds of maglev is around 265mph. Maglevs have gone significantly faster around 375mph, but thats not really a realistic expectation for daily operations.
Imo both are extremely cool, but traditional rail is just a lot more practical for a plethora of reasons. The most important being that the installation and operational cost are just a lot more realistic than maglev. There's a reason there's only a total of 37 miles of maglev in operation today compared to over 30k miles of high-speed rail.
Yeah, but it's not something you would ever see in operation. The V150 trial had special modified and powered cars running on the most favorable railway conditions possible. Plus, running over 200mph on steel starts to create enough friction to damage the wheels and rail.
Built to spec does do a lot of heavy lifting. American distances are larger than European distances. China has the advantage of a dictatorship which can be decisive.
But the Interstate system was expensive and had a crazy spec and was built and continues to be maintained at an extremely high cost.
Last I heard, maglev is mostly vaporware. Just build good tracks.
tbf idk on which behalf you argue about american distances. But i feel(!)¹ like thats another reason to prefer regular ass trains(with implied heavy lifting specs). Like it is known that you can build >tenthousand miles of regular high speed tracks to build a tight network between major cities. It has been done. America doesnt even have the huge issue of several differing national standards which are in competition to eachother but still want to be connected ideally like in europe.
Track maintenance is expensive and even more so when in remote areas. Population density is much lower in USA than most of Europe so km rail per person is just much higher.
Hasn’t stopped the interstate system from taking billions of dollars a year though.
Building a strong high speed rail in dense areas like New England and Midwest probably would be a good starter because people can see how well it works. But there’s so much carbrain inertia.
Indeed, that's really only true because the United States and Canada have vast areas in which nobody lives. About 1/3 of the U.S. is federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management; that really throws off the average. If I recall correctly, around 40% of the population of Canada lives along a line between Windsor and Montréal. Meanwhile, this is Spain compared to the Northeast:
Spain has a population just under 50 million. It also has a high-speed rail network. You'd think that in a region with a far, far higher population density, the U.S. and Canada could do better than the Acela.
Japan and afaik also china are building long distance maglev lines at the moment. We will see if there are any issues that regular hsr wouldn't have. It's certainly expensive to build, but high speed connection between major cities can be worth it. Technology that can go at almost 2/3 the speed of planes but is able to run entirely on electricity isn't necessarily just some gimmick, there is an actual use case for it. 300 km/h is fast, but 500 is a lot faster. Of course just like with existing HSR, building routes that support these high speeds is a challenge (and part of why japans line under construction is so much faster than the existing shinkansen is that it just cuts straight through the mountains, which is of course expensive).
The planned line is supposedt to be even faster than flying (45m vs 1h) overall, probably due to the overhead of taxiing. And that's without considering security.
However, in 2024, Central Japan Railway Co-President Shunsuke Niwa said that due to construction delays a 2027 opening was now impossible and it is not expected to open until at least 2034.
Yes, but for any given technology successfully replaced, there were multiple attempts with tech that were unsuccessful. In the 1890s everyone thought shipping would be replaced by airships, and yet despite every aerospace engineer's best efforts they remain niche at best. What replaced seaships? Planes! JK it's still 90% seaships.
Imagine how this would disempower landlords if you could commute to either of those cities from anywhere between them.
Car dependency is about power, it's about keeping workers vulnerable and reliant on constant employment to participate in society. The one thing the US and Canada has over other imperial powers is the obscene amount of space each state has at its disposal within the metropole with which to construct what really is an exceptional form of oppression. It's important to recognize that when you're talking about ending car dependency, this is an existential threat to either power, and they will treat it in kind.
There is convenience in the ineptitude of neoliberal politics in state-planning and infrastructure, which most people attribute as the cause of this development, but it's crucial to remember that suburban sprawl and car dependency were state projects by the US and Canada in very much they same way neoliberal privatization is.
America is just a collection of subscription fees you must pay in order to survive. You need a car, rent, groceries, and bills at the bare minimum so you must have a job or you will die in the street.
Yes, and it's important to identify why that happens and how it functions, not satisfy ourselves with the certainty that it is bad, or unjust, or unreasonable; which many of these posts end up doing.
The US is the way it is because that is what settler-colonialism and capitalism require to continue. Even when there were periods of "reform," such as the labour and state policies of the welfare liberal era in the 1930s-40s (which is how suburbanism and car dependency came about), or the civil rights movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century (which is how neoliberalism and the liberal appropriation of social justice was achieved), victories in reform are inevitably eroded by these fundamental imperatives.
Though capitalism is pervasive globally, I don't think it's necessary to narrow our understanding of its specificities within the US metropole to be able to discuss the commonalities globally.
Car dependency is certainly more prevalent within the US than it is the EU, but even it's presence in either takes on different forms and performs different functions. And then, the car dependency in the US is different from colonized spaces in Latin America, or between Latin American settler-colonial states like Brazil or Argentina.
We have the same car dependency issues here in Australia. I tried to go without a car once, and then I realised it would take me 2 hours and 2 transfers to go to work instead of a 30 minute drive. And good luck going to any appointment; you end up taking a lot of taxis
yes, it happens in many places. Except, Australia has just under 30 million people in it, where the US has 350 million. Additionally, the US is where the car industry and car-centric city planning emerged, and it did so within the context of a culture with not only a settler-colonial incentive to dominate space, but also a significant population of other oppressed groups who posed a threat to white supremacy, like African Americans. Even though both the US and Australia engage in imperialism, the US has a much more expansive and pervasive imperial presence globally. Consequently, suburban sprawl was as much an element of white supremacy within the metropole as it was a military necessity once WWII concluded and the US state became anxious about decentralizing its manufacturing industries.
So, even though car dependency exists in other settler-colonial states, like Australia or Canada, the context and conditions under which that car dependency is created and functions is substantially different.
Nice try, commie, but a train doesn't help GMAC make more car loans, nor does it help Exxon-Mobil sell more gasoline. Worse still, if people are commuting together they might build community and solidarity and then how will we keep them all working for 1/10 of the value they produce, huh? Next time think about Wall St before you go suggesting crazy ideas like high speed rail!
California: Hang on, we got another rich land owner suing us because the rail path would cut through their lucrative almond orchard that they pump ground water to use for flood irrigation because fuck you.
There's lots of profit in building infrastructure. There's little profit in finishing it. That's why in US or UK you get endless construction projects that cost billions but never deliver anything useful.
Car infrastructure has lower up-front costs, but much higher lifetime costs than rail. That's the real profit making scheme here. That, plus you have to buy a car to opt-in, which is a major expense and one that has to be made every 5-15 years.
Except there is plenty of profit in the form of increased commerce. Indirect profit is something corporations and government struggles with. Line will go up after this is built. Which takes more than a fucking quarter
They actively don't want that. That means someone else is getting credit for their political capital, and as we all know it's a zero sum game: if someone else is winning, you're losing
More like three and a half hours if you want an actually usefull line that stops.at places where people wanna stop at and you add the time needed to accelerate and decelerate but yeah. Also thats calculating with 500kmh which is very much cutting edge and constructing a line like that takes decades BUT that doesnt mean such investments arent worth it and also just fixing transport within a city is already worth it.
China and Japan seem to have figured this shit out. How come the largest economy in the world can't? Pissed about with Elon and his Hyperloop which would be too expensive for any regular person (extreme maintenance costs) and can't move as many people (very limited size). And it didn't even work!
Meanwhile elsewhere the train wasn't being reinvented, but improved, and it's actually functional.
Also, you can have high speed transit between two major stations, then take local transit to your specific destination. That's what central stations are supposed to be for.
Musk has openly admitted he propped Hyperloop for the sole purpose of stopping California to build a high speed train. He never intended to deliver anything.
Not openly. He allegedly admitted it to his ghostwriter, behind closed doors, but publicly denies it. He claims it was a misunderstanding, which is plausible.
Yeahhh but chicago is several large cities away from new york so thats why im saying they would need a stop for each of them. You can of course have commuter trains that skip some of those and others that serve the less used ones of course, and shuttles as well but you also have to consider that chicago and ny are 1100kms away from each other in a straight line while tokyo and kyoto are 370kms from each other in a straight line for example and those are 2 hours by train(and i looked from the train stations which are not in the center of the city tho you could argue they are somewhat but these metropolitan areas are so large that they have multiple city centers) so that means if you just multiply it up you would get that the chicago-ny line would be a six hour journey. This is, of course, probably not correct. Im just trying to show how you cant just draw a straight line between two places and say "Train!". Tho of course you also have to calculate with the fact that the us is much richer than both china and japan but once again that just complicates things again.
you cant just draw a straight line between two places and say "Train!"
Never forget what they took from us. They being the promoters of the ny-chicago electric air line railroad. Also if it were built and the right of way stayed intact we could absolutely build a maglev that could go center to center in 3 hours.
Plains fly over the obstacles? Thats kinda the point? Also i may have underestimated the amount of people flying in the us cause in europe one flight a day is completely normal for destinations at this distance. Of course if thousands of people want to move between these two locations each day a regular shuttle could make sense but you cant just ignore the distance, 2.5 hourse is a very very best case scenario. Planes can also fly boutta 1000kmh but that doesnt mean a place 1000kms away takes 1 hour, 1.5 to 2 hours is completely normal for a journey like that without accounting for all the flight related hassles. Of course thats a huge upside of trains but you cant just freely apply train to everything. This is very likely a place where a highspeed rail connection would make sense but nothing is ideal instantly. Not to talk about how these cities would have to improve their own public transit to be able to connect to a wider network efficiently.
Literally nobody ever thought we shouldn't make a direct flight route from Chicago to New York because there's other cities people might want to stop at. It's similarly absurd problem to imagine for trains.
Hyperloop is incredibly stupid on the face of it for so many reasons, the two largest of which IMO actually being that it would be incredibly unsafe as escape would be impossible in case of an incident and that it's literally physically impossible, as the material tolerances required are incompatible with the temperature shifts that happen everywhere on account of weather and seasons.
A thing a lot of people don't understand about high speed rail is that it needs to be very straight and very flat. Draw a straight line from those two cities and count the number of places it goes through, the different elevations and figure out how you'd bulldoze through it all.
China seems to have figured it out in their mountainous regions. Some of the lines are 90% tunnel+raised rails. And as an American we should talk about how China is roughly the same size as America. The excuse well has run dry.
I’m all for high speed rail in the US, but comparing the land area of the two countries is not really that relevant.
China’s network is really focused on about a third of the land area. US could do the same, but the big population hubs are separated and on opposite sides of the country, so it’s less ideal - lot of track to connect the two. It’s like 2-3x the distance to connect LA/NYC vs Chongqing/Shanghai.
China also has 4x the population of the US. So the cost/benefit to build this out is simply much more favorable for china.
Most importantly, China’s autocratic government can clear the red tape to get big projects like this done. Just getting the land rights to build the right track could kill a transcontinental project in the US. But that decision is consolidated in the Chinese government. This cuts time and cost immensely.
But that's a non issue. If you want to get from LA to NYC, you fly. If you want to get from Chicago to NYC or from LA to San Francisco, you take the HSR... I mean you would if the US had a fully developed transport infrastructure.
The corridors I mentioned are perfectly fine HSR corridors, the population numbers and distances are great for HSR, perfectly suitable. That is absolutely not the propblem. Developed countries would have already HSR along those corridors, heavily used HSR, that is transformative for the places along it.
The problem is not getting the land, the problem is politics and legislation that is hostile to it and as a consequence it is nigh impossible to get that land for critical infrastructure like that (hostile legislation is also the reason why multiple the times of construction costs have to be paid for non-construction expenses, not even counting land acquisition). Curiously enough it is not impossible to ever widen highways or even build entirely new ones.
From a network perspective it wouldn't make sense to build a Chicago - New York straight line with 0 stops... You'ld better link up Chicago to Cleveland, probably even do the Detroit detour and continue that in an expensive Appalachian tunnel to Washington DC. Then in a separate project build a high speed rail connecting the east coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington...
Yeah i mention that in a different comment, many cities and countries have systems with full service, shuttle, commuter, etc trains that all serve different modes of transport with the same vehicle(idk how to phrase it exactly). Point is one machine and line(your train in this case) can serve customers demanding different kinds of service by running different schedules.
Also high-speed rail doesn't run at top speed the whole time. You might have a few flat spots here and there, but most of the time it's running much slower.
Also, if there's a problem with a train, the whole rail goes down. If there's a problem with an airplane, the other planes have a whole lot of sky they can still use.
Also, if there’s a problem with a train, the whole rail goes down. If there’s a problem with an airplane, the other planes have a whole lot of sky they can still use.
That's not how rail works.
There absolutely are passing places where a train can hop onto the left track and then back again, or just a long stretch of an extra track going parallel to the main route where either the faulty train can sit and wait for repairs, or the working trains can jump around the faulty one.
Source: living in a country that actually has a working passenger railway system.
So only 4000 miles of grade-separated high-speed rail (and all the infrastructure and private property easements, divisions, etc required for the construction) just to connect just these 2 cities? No problem.
You don't connect just those two cities, mate. You connect them as the main artery and then do split-offs to other areas. Or, even better, you weave the main railway between major cities East-to-West to connect them directly.
What are you talking about? Chicago-NYC are maybe 1200 km, perfectly within HSR distance and definitely within Maglev distance. The two urban areas are also huge enough to support such a thing, especially as there are a few mid sized urban areas in between.
This passing problem was solved a long time ago, it's just that the freight rail corps in the US have "optimized" for trains that are longer than the passing rail sections. It's extremely bad for the entire rail industry and the cause of many of the derailments and accidents, but because capital always gets its way in the US, nothing significantly has changed to resolve the issue.
It's very frustrating how often there are perfectly workable solutions to making the world better, but if it doesn't have a fat profit margin, it just gets strangled to death by capital interests in this country.
Honestly I'd give shit like that a pass, silent letters are stupid and sometimes don't even exist in certain spellings for the same word looking at you soder, sodder, solder. Also if anyone brings up the l in solder being pronounced, not in my dialect nor in most other older dialects I've encountered only the ones wherein they reromanticized random words.
How is that ethnocentric? I'm a Californian Redneck barely a culture and sure as shit not a ethnicity. My point was to moreso directly shit on the English in particular who reintroduced the l pronunciation and indirectly caused a bunch of random fuckers to get pissy with me. In hindsight I probably should specified, regardless I am unfamiliar with any dialect pre 1900s who pronounced the l in solder.
Pretty sure you guys were effected by the reromanticized effect, that broadly speaking started around the 1850s or so in England though wasn't fully finalized until about the 1970s or so. Solder was just one of the more unified examples of a word being effected due to it being rarely used outside of blacksmiths up until the industrial revolution and it being a relatively easy thing to assume the l was pronounced by the developing metal working tradesmen unless the region had the soder or sodder spellings instead of with the traditional spelling.
Oh most certainly but also I'm going to take every moment to shit on anything and everything the English aristocracy has ever done if it's even the least bit stupid. I will shed the blood of Saxon men.
Its all the lead in the pipes, it makes the frogs gay with all the chemtrail fallout on this flat earth being watched by Jewish space laser satellites.
Pizza is pizza. But Chicago style is a casserole. They should just call it a Chicago casserole to avoid confusion. I can't imagine the fury of someone ordering a pizza and getting a bread bowl of marinara sauce instead.
chicago has two types of pizza, the 'deep dish' you're referring to, and the thin and crispy (tavern-style) cut in squares. pretty much only tourists eat the deep dish. locals usually go for the thin crust, maybe the other once a year.
fuck, I miss those thin crust Chicago tavern-style pizzas, and I've never even visited Chicago! I can't seem to find any good ones withing a reasonable distance from where I live in a medium-sized city in a very major metropolitan area. It's very frustrating.
I hope one day the rest of the world will learn that Chicago deep dish is a gimmick, and what people in Chicago just call "pizza" is a completely different thing that's way better.
Meanwhile, Musk is at it again, pitching a hyperloop tunnel to link Austin and San Antonio. Nevermind that it’s a ton of limestone and aquifers along that route.
Since this is directed at the American people asking why they don't have or want this, they do. They have for decades. Just as an example look at the history of high speed rail in Florida. It was put to a public vote on the ballot at least once, overwhelming voted for, and the politicians said (laughingly)... "Oh no. No, we can't afford to do the will of the people. Sorry." Then spent the same amount elsewhere probably. So, that's why.
Florida passed it once, under Jeb Bush, who was against it, and simply said No. The voters wanted it bad enough that they voted on it again, and passed it with wide bipartisan support, because it was a no-brainer. Private funds were going to build it, and cover all construction overruns. Then they would operate it for a decade, to get it running, then once it had 10 years of experience under its belt, it would be handed over the state to run, presumably at a profit by then. It would have been the root of a high speed rail system that would run up the east coast, and then start spreading west. It wasn't going to cost the taxpayers a penny, and everybody wanted it, which is why it passed TWICE!
Jeb was dragging his feet, and then Convicted Criminal Rick Scott got elected, and immediately killed it, despite NEVER mentioning in his campaign a single time. It outraged people so badly, that there was talk of a recall, but it turns out the Florida legislature had passed a law prohibiting recalls, after Jeb Bush helped his brother cheat his way into the presidency in 2000. He must have been worried that the Democrats would come after him for cheating, but he vastly overestimated the Democrats courage.
So Convicted Criminal Rick Scott got elected, and killed the high speed rail deal, but by the end of his second term, he allowed a new normal speed rail line between Miami and Orlando that nobody uses, because why would they?
Oh, and by the way, Convicted Criminal Rock Scott had a 3% investment stake in the NEW rail line. He didn't have any investment in the one he killed, that everybody wanted. Which explains everything you need to know about Convicted Criminal Rick Scott, who will be running for president in 2028. He wants to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and ALL social safety nets, and every word he says is a lie, his ONLY priority is using his office to increase his net worth, he LOVES insider trading and loudly opposes any restrictions on it, and every word he says is a lie.
Edit: And despite all of his condemnations of "career politicians," he's made every penny of his fortune off the government, including a massive Medicaid fraud scheme that formed the foundation of his fortune.
Before that, he was in the Navy, and after that he was a politician, which he has done since 2011, when he bought the Florida governor's office. Nothing like starting at the top.
He also runs on Term Limits, of course, they all do.
I can confirm this is pretty accurate. I voted for the high speed rail twice as did most people because it was a great idea and would have worked surprisingly well in FL. The repeated line of shitbag evil governors and their majority in the state congress stopped anything good from happening and allowed the continued grifting.
In Florida, it only gets done if it funnels money to established GoP donors. On the off chance something gets funded that they can't steal from, it gets shut down ASAP.
This is doable, we just have to convince our leaders is bad for the environment, will hurt brown people, will get them filthy rich and also paint them fake gold and put Drumpfs name on each train
The biggest issue is that it's expensive and what we have now is functional. People aren't keen on dropping tons of cash to make something better because they're short-sighted and don't care about the future.
Also NIMBY's would shut it down hard, not wanting to live near the rail. There'd also be a lot of eminent domain claims when the rail would get close to any station point.
Back when the US had excellent rail networks, we could have upgraded and maintained them for passenger rail. But so much has been ripped out and paved over that it'd be very expensive to bring it back... and no one wants to pay more in taxes despite receiving more money back in benefit.
I get your point about how our existing transportation system is functional. I mean, it's not, but it's functional enough that people and policymakers can point to it and claim that it's good enough. We can't point to all of the trips that aren't happening because our system is so godawful exactly because they're not happening.
I just think of Amtrak's Borealis route from Minneapolis to Chicago. It's not terribly convenient (2 trains a day), nor that fast (7½ hours), nor all that cheap (close to $50), and it has blown ridership projections completely out of the water. A lot of people really want to take the train, and I understand, because the alternatives (driving or flying) are so much worse.
I have plenty of friends who'd love a train to Chicago. The Illinois Central route is still in use for freight. But Wisconsin just can't get it together to offer passenger service. Beyond NIMBYs, as we saw in the campaign for governor in 2010, rail has become a political identity issue, coded as Democratic, so Republicans are reflexively against it. As well, it's a racist dog-whistle, as seen in the bizarro claims that a train would bring Chicago crime to the city.
It's functional in that people can get from point A to point B when they need to. Flights aren't prohibitively expensive enough to push people to take the tax increase. A flight from Minneapolis to Chicago is like $100-$200, and for the rare occurrence someone needs that specific route, it's not that expensive to pay for.
Don't get me wrong, we'd be much better off with a national rail network connecting major cities. But Americans are some of the most cost-averse voters, both on the left and right. And you're looking at a multi-billion dollar project for something like a Chicago to NYC line. The citizens of Illinois and NYC aren't keen to take the tax hike. Fed won't pay for it since it only benefits 2 specific voter bases and doesn't do anything to swing an election (Dems win those cities anyway, Republicans will never take them over even if they funded rail).
Agreed that it's functional in that people can get from point A to point B, but just throwing in that are a lot of people who nevertheless don't make trips because those trips are harder and more stressful than they need to be. (Elderly and disabled people, and children, as some examples.) As well, our system requires lots of trips that people don't want, or shouldn't need, to make.
What we have now is not functional. And you will never convince me that we somehow don't have enough money to make the average American's life better, but somehow we have the money to spend 43.6 billion, so far, on a pointless war with Iran. We have the money
The problem isn't that it can't happen, the problem is people won't vote to pay more in taxes. Left or right, we've shown that any candidate that runs on increasing taxes gets slaughtered because the voter base is too short sighted. New rail is incredibly expensive, taxes would need to be increased to pay for it (the money HAS to come from somewhere).
It's "functional" in that people can get from Chicago to NYC relatively quickly - through a flight. Sure, it's gonna cost a few hundred $$ a person, but it's not enough of a barrier to get people to pay significantly more in taxes for a few years to pay for an alternative.
The federal government isn't going to step in and do something like this ever either. They're the only ones who could even conceivably do this, but spending billions for 2 specific states doesn't sway voters from the other 48.
You missed the point. We do not have to increase taxes to achieve this. We just have to stop bombing the shit out of half the world and reallocate that funding.
Our taxes could stay exactly the same. Of course the lobbyists prefer we spend billions and billions on pointless wars and the military, but we don't get shit from it.
Only if the federal government paid for it, and they won't for the reasons I mentioned. No use catering to a vote they already have.
I don't like it any more than you do, but it's a massive side effect of the way our government works. Swing states are the only things that matter and none of them are in need of high speed rail
We may not have a functional rail system, but we have an excellent highway system, and there is absolutely no reason that high speed rail lines can't be run down the medians of many highways, eliminating much of the eminent domain issues.
There will still be pain points, but that's the challenge of progress. A national High Speed Rail system would be worth the trouble.
I personally agree, but the voter base doesn't. People are unwilling to take the tax increase over taking a flight for the rare occurrence they go between the two cities. And the issue is getting INTO the city, not near the city. Once you hit the suburbs of either city you're fucked. Not that it can't be done, but the price tag skyrockets and that makes it a harder pill for voters to swallow.
Seriously, though, far too many Americans still tie their identity to their vehicle. The stupid notion of rugged American individualism has really held the country back.
There are plenty of other things, but I'm just pointing out this one.
Ughh this comment section. Americans are so dumb?m, and yes I speak for myself as well. We have been so propagandized my exemptional individualism that when we’re presented with something that could benefit all of we turn and run. It’s so god damn stupid.
Other than the NIMBY-ism, lawyers all looking to make a shitload of money off the taxpayer by looking for reasons to delay the project, and the anti-mass transit attitude the US has…just look at the California high speed rail project mired in legal grifting for instance.
There’s generic American “we fuck up nice things becuase fuck the rules” attitudes. You can have nice high-speed rail in places like Europe or Japan, or high speed driving on segments of the Autobahn, because society has enough sense to not fuck it up. They’re not parking tractor trailers or cars on rail intersections causing crashes on rail like we have all the time in the US. People generally obey rules like keeping right unless passing, or not blocking the passing lane in Europe. In several shopping areas and airports they have people movers without steps that are ramps betwen floors. In the US it would be a very short period between the installation and some fool riding a skateboard or bike down the ramp and hurting themselves or other people - then come the lawsuits. Someone would probably punch an idiot trying to do that in Europe.
So yeah. Even if we could muster the political balls to build such a needed rail, and get the money for it (because it would have to be profitable of course), some jackass would light the track on fire, park a car on it, or who knows what other dumbassery, because fuck nice things.
I find the hardest issue with trains is getting to the smaller side destinations. I guess you're still gonna need a small car or bike for that of course. Plus I'm used to semi rural so I'd still have to drive a few miles to even get on the train to go somewhere. And it wouldnt make any sense for going to a friends house for example.
No idea how it works really. Plus I'm almost always hauling gear to a destination so a train wouldnt work for me anyway. Going to get groceries is about the only thing I'd use it for and I wouldnt be able to carry an entire cartload.
Plus I'm almost always hauling gear to a destination so a train wouldnt work for me anyway. Going to get groceries is about the only thing I'd use it for and I wouldnt be able to carry an entire cartload.
Commuter trains in Europe and Asia have dedicated spaces for riders to store stuff they need to haul. People in my city bring entire truckloads of stuff on board the dedicated freight spaces at the end of each train car.
Think of it as mixed-mode transport. Here's how it's done in much of Europe:
Walkable cities
Bike lanes within cities and to suburbs
Rent e-bike or scooter, sometimes included in bus/train passes
Free bike service stations with pumps and tools placed around the town
Mix of buses, underground trains, trams with lots of stops and departures
You can bring your bike on the train
Fast intercity trains, main train station centrally located
Use cargo bike for hauling stuff
Cars/vans for everything else
But honestly though it sounds like your situation (rural, often transporting bulky things) calls for a car. But the point is that reducing the number of cars on the road helps the remaining drivers too.
Yeah but you have what you have. I don't think it's viable to just destroy suburbia either. Narrowing roads to add proper walking/biking paths, adding some stores/services and public transit would go some of the way.
I think you're imagining that the suggestion being put forward is that they'd just build that one train line, and everything else would stay exactly the same?
Haha no, that would be rediculous. I'm just saying its very hard to imagine my life with trains and how that actually factors into daily life.
The only time ive been on trains/subways is vacationing to big cities, where I still had a rental car but parked far from the city and rode the train in. That was fine and all for touristy things.
For 98% of people in huge cities I can see it. For every person I know IRL, it would not work. The suburban nightmare alone with people with 4 kids trying to get them to school alone wouldnt work. You'd basically have to tear down and rebuild all of suburbia. Not that I'm opposed to that, just leave me out of the city myself.
I find the hardest issue with trains is getting to the smaller side destinations. I guess you’re still gonna need a small car or bike for that of course
That's the same with airports. And actually no big deal if you have working public transport. You arrive in the city center. And then there are local trains, street cars and busses to bring you into every part of the city or to nearby smaller towns
You can't put an international airport anywhere and there may be some flights going to smaller airports from that, but there are no airstrips in your local suburbs?
I don’t even care if we built high speed trains that go that fast in the US. I just wish our rail system was more extensive and prioritized passenger trains over freight trains, which they are required to by law but isn’t enforced.
Getting the property and easements is probably the hardest part, especially when the will is presumably there for the urban hubs. Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Pittsburgh, etc. on to New York on a shinkansen would be awesome but, especially in the city, they're never getting all the land to even start. It would also presumably need to be elevated like the shinkansen here in japan
Biggest issue is getting all the palms greased. Red tape disappears when money gets funnels to donors. They'll straight up eminent domain peoples houses if the right billionaire is getting their cut.
This is true, but I do have compassion for the people who would lose their homes and businesses, especially if they're pensioners or on fixed income. Especially for older folks, moving away from support networks can be traumatic, so I would hope there is a good solution there (though I'm not sure what that would be other than huge amounts of cash).
We have so much lower hanging fruit than this on the NE corridor. But the US has forgotten how to build any infrastructure that isn't a highway. Conventional HSR at 300kmh would do wonders for the NE corridor if we could get it built somehow.
The current Lake Shore Limited route is 1,543 km. Doing that in 2.5 hours requires an average speed of 617 km/hr. At TGV top speeds of 320 km/hr it is a 4.8 hour trip.
As far as I know, 600 km/hr requires the development of additional technology not in operational use in other countries.
Shit is so far apart here it's more difficult and expensive to connect the cities. It 100% should be done but instead we need to reeeealy invest in city infrastructure around data centers right now. Sowwy
Imagine the new residential and commercial opportunities (and taxes) along that rail as well. Oh well, will never happen as long as republicans are alive and voting.
a viable high speed rail system is more than just the trains.
its the rails.. and most the rail in america is owned by private freight companies. freight companies who don't like sharing their rail with passenger trains, and probably wholly unsuitable for high speed trains to begin with.
So you'd have to build your own stations, and lay your own rail, which.. if you want the trains to go anywhere useful, is probably going to involve enough land buyouts and eminent domain as to take up 95% of the budget of any rail plan.
But realism aside, it'd be fuckin wonderful if we could have a national high speed rail network that you could jump on to go almost anywhere.
Funny how the country can eminent domain your property to build a road or a transmission line, but they seem to not be able to eminent domain this nice rail system
Also we have spent an insane amount of money, 43.6 billion so far, fighting a pointless war in Iran. Yet it's unrealistic to spend money on rail
cause billionaires arent pushing for high speed rail, which is why theres no motive to do it. . because the American government is a government of the rich, for the rich.
The US economy is based on spending as much possible as a consumer. Rather than focusing on infrastructure to improve livelihood, the aim is have endless construction and maintenance for as many people as possible. Everybody needs a car, or else you cannot safely travel(in the normal-ass suburbs where I grew up it was an hour walk to the grocery store, few pedestrian crossings for highways, and there plenty of sidewalks that simply ended due to gated communities or neighboring towns or villages that simply didn't to build some twords there edges). Each car will need to be taxed, registered, sold, bought, insured, fixed, fueled, towed, fined, accessorised, and finally scrapped and sold again in peices. If there was good public transportation, then less money would be changing hands, and the economy would look less impressive..
I don't think that was original reason, but I'm certain it's on the minds of modern economists now
While we spent 20 years, and 7 trillion bucks, losing wars in the Middle East, China built a nationwide high speed rail system from scratch, and eliminated most poverty in their country.
We just got out of one 20 year quagmire, and now Trump gets us right into another one. Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, etc. all LOVE it though.
We have the money to do anything we want in this country - free health care, college/trades, pre-k, etc., but the people we elect on both sides prefer to waste it on Wars, and policies that help the ultra-wealthy, which is Wars.
High-way expansion is flattening areas, throwing oil and rock down, doing signage and some guard rails.
High speed rail is precision architecture, requiring seizing property from owners and fighting every town that doesn't want the train coming through or stopping.
It's not like we have a great rail network to upgrade. We're struggling to keep what freight rail we have operational.
You can fly from Chicago to NYC for $100
You can rail from Chicago to NYC for $70 on current architecture.
You can bus from Chicago to NYC for $80
That's a 12 hour drive. Those "highway expansions" aren't being driven by people trying to drive 12 hours. Nor to they cost enough to build a high percision train line.
In no fossil fuel world does completing a multi-billion dollar rail project make it cheaper and faster than the existing flights.
Imagine installing a new line from scratch, from the center of Madrid to Paris. can't reuse any existing lines, you need to mow down any homes or businesses in the way and fight every town on the way through.
We build relatively few new highways, they're generally lane addition projects. Baltimore has added 2-3 lanes N,S and Beltway without taking any additional land beyond the stuff done in the early 1900's.
The freight industry is a huge source of the problems in the US rail system. It should not be able to run trains longer than the passing sections, but it does it anyway because "it reduces labor costs". Running longer trains is terrible from an engineering perspective.
TSA would make it take 3 hrs to get through security and every state transport agency would funnel so much money to the mob that each ticket would cost $4k and you'd still have your seat cancelled due to overbooking.
edit:if the trains were faster the cost would make sense. if that 20 hour amtrak ride was actually 2.5 hours like the planes to get from the middle of the us to the east cost of the us, then the 194$ train ticket vs 98$ (minimum you could find is probably like 98$ you’re more or less looking at like 120$/plane ticket) plane ticket would make sense.
Flying: The fastest and most popular mode of travel. Over 50 daily nonstop flights operate between NYC airports (LGA, JFK, EWR) and Chicago airports (ORD, MDW), with flight times averaging roughly 2.5 hours.
Amtrak Train: The Lake Shore Limited runs direct daily service between New York Penn Station and Chicago Union Station, taking approximately 19 to 20 hours.
Round-trip flight prices from New York to Chicago start around $232, and one-way tickets start around $84 to $113 on platforms like Google Flights.
it's around 198$ one way for new york to chicago, amtrak.
*it's not cost feasible to sleep next to your bathroom on amtrak for 20 hours for 200$. *
It's always a bit ridiculous seeing posts about public transport, from the country which doesn't know public transport. Claim and picture of this post are accordingly ridiculous. This isn't public transport, this is a pipe dream.
The US environment, systems, and societies are not conducive to HSR. You will see widespread cheap electric flights before you see HSR.
Here's a good video explaining why: https://youtu.be/753xlF0EWsI
Basically the land costs way more, it's viewed as business that needs to profit, not infrastructure you spend on, and you cant bulldoze over people as cheaply to make the necessary routes.
My feeling is that widespread high speed rail will never take off in America there are too many barriers. Two that come to mind that will delay and increase the cost to prohibitive levels are Private Land acquisition and Environmental assessments and preservation laws.
What I think will be a more realistic "High speed Rail" option for the US is using existing infrastructure in new ways. Something like fully automated cars, where each car is similar to a rail car and the connection between cars is digital not physical.
What, exactly are you talking about that you think is "encoded" into our constitution to allow us to completely replace our government with a new government? I really can't think of anything that fits that. You're either talking about Article V, which allows for constitutional amendment (but that is NOT a system for fixing the a need for an entirely different government) or you're talking about the 2nd Amendment (again, not what you're talking about) and that would be a VERY different way of achieving those results. Either way, I'm confused about what you mean.
Or are we just operating on different concepts of what the word "government" means in this context? FYI, when most Americans say, "new government" they mean an entirely new political system, not a change in administration. We would just say, "administration" for that.
The ridiculous bullshit is that the Lakeshore Limited already goes from Chicago to New York, but hits its maximum speed of 180km/h on a few stretches of track in the east that Amtrak owns. It averages only about 60km/h for the whole trip. That's because the freight companies don't care to maintain their tracks for high speed, since freight service doesn't need it.
I'm still pissed at Pres. Biden threw the rail workers unions under the train, when he should've protected the economy by nationalizing the rails to establish leverage over the corporations, instead. It would have had so many knock-on benefits to the nation.
The rights of way already exist for the most part. The whole nation was built on railways. Most are just cargo only, and many have been converted to bike/foot paths.
Alternatively, interstate highway rights of way could be used.
I really don't get this pro train community. Cars are much more convenient. U can haul multiple Things. Kids, griceries, furniture - this is not easily replaceable with trains.
And Nobody commutes from Chicago to nyc
449 replies
Fuck Maglev.
Regular ass trains on steel tracks can go >200mph if built to spec. Suuuure, maglev can go even faster. But regular ass trains on steel tracks can actually be build on a realistic budget. Like in theory atleast. But before the US does something this sane they're gonna nuke themselves. idk
Maglev isn't even more expensive. High speed rails that are built "to spec" for 400 km/h are expensive as fuck. Trains are usually shorter but frequency is higher, so per passenger it roughly evens out.
The real deal breaker is the lack of compatibility. Can't ever run a maglev train on legacy rail while your high speed train can use the existing system to bridge gaps in the high speed network.
also, monorails of any sort are harder to switch than dual-rail lines, making the networks less flexible.
Well sir, there's nothing on Earth like a genuine, bona-fide, electrified, six-car monorail!
Brockway!
I don't see any problems with switching tracks on this thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyro_monorail
I don’t know why you would want compatibility. The Shinkansen is also always on their own track. Air planes aren’t compatible with train tracks either, so if you look at it more from a perspective of what they’re trying to replace I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.
I think it’s also mainly the start up and build costs, I think the wear of the rails of high speed trains on wheels is very costly
So you can have your high speed trains run to more remote stations, limiting the amount of changes for passengers. Took the train to Grenoble that way, which is quite comfortable with a direct connection from Paris.
Not more expensive? Hard to say because also nobody builds them! But I don't think there's any specification you could make today that could be met cheaper with maglev than with old school big iron.
Regular ass train gang. Let's stop trying to reinvent something that already works way better than whatever half ass bullshit you thought about for a couple hours.
Trams for short distance, metro for medium, trains for long and high-speed for very long.
It's trains all the way down.
What, and think and plan stuff rather than just harnessing the chaos. No thanks.
Well my train has blackjack and hookers
"Sir, as I've repeatedly told you, this is the casino and not a train. Are you hitting or sticking?"
We need a rail line that is strictly for commuters. Right now the rails are owned by freight companies so they prioritize freight over people. Yes we do have the infrastructure to initiate high speed rails, but those rails are used for objects not people.
Tbh they don't even prioritize the freight, that went away with psr
Passengers is the term you mean, not commuters. I read the first sentence and thought you were going to suggest something that is only open to people coming from and going to work.
But yes, we need passenger rail that's exclusively passenger rail.
Also like, magnets get destroyed in water, so how do you deal with rain? /s
Reverse the polarity
Maglev makes sense in connecting only the major cities like Japan is doing
maglev is the closest we can get to a portal network.
Truly, any good transportation system literally bends time and space in my mind, I imagine maglevs do that on a continental scale
Cries in HS2
Don't worry, the cost inflation of HS2 could easily be achieved on any maglev project too.
I don't know much about various train technologies, but surely that's going to cause massive wear and tear on the tracks and need to be serviced very often right? And any debris on the track is probably going to cause quite bad damage to the wheels too.
I don't know, but I feel like your "if built to spec" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, what kind of spec? Is that sort of quality realistic for a real-world installation? Exposed to the elements?
Maglev is definitely more expensive to build and probably to run, but it seems like it'd be far more reliable? And also a much smoother experience for those on-board?
And I feel like Maglev has much greater theoretical speed limits than typical contact tracks, as, well, we basically remove the friction between the wheel and the track?
Also imo Maglev is cool and gets style points.
Most industry nations around the world are running high speed trains by now. They're doing petty fine I'd say. China threw a ton of money into German maglev tech and there isn't really much to see still. There's a reason most countries gave up on it.
Zehn Minuten!!
Ich wünsche mir die Zeit zurück, in der ich über Politiker fast ausschließlich lachen musste, statt mich endlos über sie aufzuregen.
Nicht, dass es da nicht auch genug Gründe gegeben hätte, aber zwischendrin kam immer mal wieder etwas raus was nicht komplett gestört war.
More like zehn minuten später
I reckon it'll be one of those things that was just ahead of it's time, I think the concept is sound, but other infrastructure to run it, energy, rare-earth mining, just isn't ready to keep up yet.
Yeah, and dont forget the scale.
Japan is building a maglev line right now. But they have >60 years of experience with high speed rail and the whole concept is established. Even then its "only" about to be 400km to connect three major metropolian areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen Still:
Chicago to New York are more like 1200km and major stops between them are like Cleveland and Toledo. Uuuh... just build regular ass rail with a bit higher specs for higher speeds...
We've spent over half that on the Iran war so far.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/us/politics/iran-war-cost-pentagon.html
Yeah, but investing in infrastructure pays out big for everyone....investing in war pays out bigger, and just for Trump and his buddies. Which would he choose?
? ICE 3 trains are already running 300 km/h in Germany and 320 in France. Nothing "ahead of its time"
I'm saying Maglev is ahead of it's time.
The main issue is that you need absurd amounts of resources just to build the track alone.
You also need absurd amounts of resources to build long distance motorways.
True, but we're talking about railway vs maglev here, and the difference here is gigantic.
Ah, yeah, got kinda lost in the thread. I thought it was about long range railway construction in general.
In the end the maintenance cost for maglev vs bullet trains are about the same. Bullet trains focus more on mechanical maintenance of the track and wheels. While the maintenance of maglev is typically more technical, it requires constant recalibration of the electronics and constant monitoring for alignment.
Traditional steel on rail is actually more reliable in practice. Theoretically the basic mechanics of maglev are more reliable, but in practice they tend to suffer from longer delays when they do fail. This is mostly because the repairs/maintenance for traditional rail can be done by just about anyone, where maglevs tend to be locked in by a single vendor contract.
They are theoretically faster, but in practice the speed of trains are most often governed not by the limitations of the trains themselves, but instead are limited by the surrounding infrastructure and terrain.
The cruising speed of railed bullet trains are around 200mph, while the cruising speeds of maglev is around 265mph. Maglevs have gone significantly faster around 375mph, but thats not really a realistic expectation for daily operations.
Imo both are extremely cool, but traditional rail is just a lot more practical for a plethora of reasons. The most important being that the installation and operational cost are just a lot more realistic than maglev. There's a reason there's only a total of 37 miles of maglev in operation today compared to over 30k miles of high-speed rail.
Remember that the TGV has the high speed record for rail, at 574kmh or 356mph
Yeah, but it's not something you would ever see in operation. The V150 trial had special modified and powered cars running on the most favorable railway conditions possible. Plus, running over 200mph on steel starts to create enough friction to damage the wheels and rail.
Built to spec does do a lot of heavy lifting. American distances are larger than European distances. China has the advantage of a dictatorship which can be decisive.
But the Interstate system was expensive and had a crazy spec and was built and continues to be maintained at an extremely high cost.
Last I heard, maglev is mostly vaporware. Just build good tracks.
Not to worry! The USA is catching up real quick on that point
tbf idk on which behalf you argue about american distances. But i feel(!)¹ like thats another reason to prefer regular ass trains(with implied heavy lifting specs). Like it is known that you can build >tenthousand miles of regular high speed tracks to build a tight network between major cities. It has been done. America doesnt even have the huge issue of several differing national standards which are in competition to eachother but still want to be connected ideally like in europe.
¹am just random idiot on the internet.
ahem excuse me.
ooof, i'm so sorry
😉
Track maintenance is expensive and even more so when in remote areas. Population density is much lower in USA than most of Europe so km rail per person is just much higher.
Hasn’t stopped the interstate system from taking billions of dollars a year though.
Building a strong high speed rail in dense areas like New England and Midwest probably would be a good starter because people can see how well it works. But there’s so much carbrain inertia.
Indeed, that's really only true because the United States and Canada have vast areas in which nobody lives. About 1/3 of the U.S. is federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management; that really throws off the average. If I recall correctly, around 40% of the population of Canada lives along a line between Windsor and Montréal. Meanwhile, this is Spain compared to the Northeast:
Spain has a population just under 50 million. It also has a high-speed rail network. You'd think that in a region with a far, far higher population density, the U.S. and Canada could do better than the Acela.
Japan and afaik also china are building long distance maglev lines at the moment. We will see if there are any issues that regular hsr wouldn't have. It's certainly expensive to build, but high speed connection between major cities can be worth it. Technology that can go at almost 2/3 the speed of planes but is able to run entirely on electricity isn't necessarily just some gimmick, there is an actual use case for it. 300 km/h is fast, but 500 is a lot faster. Of course just like with existing HSR, building routes that support these high speeds is a challenge (and part of why japans line under construction is so much faster than the existing shinkansen is that it just cuts straight through the mountains, which is of course expensive).
The planned line is supposedt to be even faster than flying (45m vs 1h) overall, probably due to the overhead of taxiing. And that's without considering security.
There’s only 6 globally, under 100km total track. Shinkansen trains are conventional rail. It’s been just around the corner for 100 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen
kinda demonstrates the point.
“It seems like this experimental tech is going to be more reliable than the proven thing that’s existed since the 19th century.”
You sure about that, hoss?
Pretty sure there's been more than a couple times in history when new technology has replaced old technology...
Yes, but for any given technology successfully replaced, there were multiple attempts with tech that were unsuccessful. In the 1890s everyone thought shipping would be replaced by airships, and yet despite every aerospace engineer's best efforts they remain niche at best. What replaced seaships? Planes! JK it's still 90% seaships.
I prefer my bread in hand torn chunks thanks.
Imagine how this would disempower landlords if you could commute to either of those cities from anywhere between them.
Car dependency is about power, it's about keeping workers vulnerable and reliant on constant employment to participate in society. The one thing the US and Canada has over other imperial powers is the obscene amount of space each state has at its disposal within the metropole with which to construct what really is an exceptional form of oppression. It's important to recognize that when you're talking about ending car dependency, this is an existential threat to either power, and they will treat it in kind.
There is convenience in the ineptitude of neoliberal politics in state-planning and infrastructure, which most people attribute as the cause of this development, but it's crucial to remember that suburban sprawl and car dependency were state projects by the US and Canada in very much they same way neoliberal privatization is.
America is just a collection of subscription fees you must pay in order to survive. You need a car, rent, groceries, and bills at the bare minimum so you must have a job or you will die in the street.
Yes, and it's important to identify why that happens and how it functions, not satisfy ourselves with the certainty that it is bad, or unjust, or unreasonable; which many of these posts end up doing.
The US is the way it is because that is what settler-colonialism and capitalism require to continue. Even when there were periods of "reform," such as the labour and state policies of the welfare liberal era in the 1930s-40s (which is how suburbanism and car dependency came about), or the civil rights movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century (which is how neoliberalism and the liberal appropriation of social justice was achieved), victories in reform are inevitably eroded by these fundamental imperatives.
And here's the punchline: no more jobs!
How will meaningless stuff get done to build disposable products?
It’s the same everywhere. Not just American thing.
Though capitalism is pervasive globally, I don't think it's necessary to narrow our understanding of its specificities within the US metropole to be able to discuss the commonalities globally.
Car dependency is certainly more prevalent within the US than it is the EU, but even it's presence in either takes on different forms and performs different functions. And then, the car dependency in the US is different from colonized spaces in Latin America, or between Latin American settler-colonial states like Brazil or Argentina.
We have the same car dependency issues here in Australia. I tried to go without a car once, and then I realised it would take me 2 hours and 2 transfers to go to work instead of a 30 minute drive. And good luck going to any appointment; you end up taking a lot of taxis
yes, it happens in many places. Except, Australia has just under 30 million people in it, where the US has 350 million. Additionally, the US is where the car industry and car-centric city planning emerged, and it did so within the context of a culture with not only a settler-colonial incentive to dominate space, but also a significant population of other oppressed groups who posed a threat to white supremacy, like African Americans. Even though both the US and Australia engage in imperialism, the US has a much more expansive and pervasive imperial presence globally. Consequently, suburban sprawl was as much an element of white supremacy within the metropole as it was a military necessity once WWII concluded and the US state became anxious about decentralizing its manufacturing industries.
So, even though car dependency exists in other settler-colonial states, like Australia or Canada, the context and conditions under which that car dependency is created and functions is substantially different.
The advantage of having an advanced economy is that you don't have to have people living by the rules of the jungle anymore.
And it's all shit that should be paid for with our taxes. But instead, they need to use that money to bomb kids on the other side of the planet.
BAM
Well it will take more than 2.5 hours if you start adding a bunch of stops.
I don't think having one track would necessarily mean there is only one train route.
Nice try, commie, but a train doesn't help GMAC make more car loans, nor does it help Exxon-Mobil sell more gasoline. Worse still, if people are commuting together they might build community and solidarity and then how will we keep them all working for 1/10 of the value they produce, huh? Next time think about Wall St before you go suggesting crazy ideas like high speed rail!
California: Hang on, we got another rich land owner suing us because the rail path would cut through their lucrative almond orchard that they pump ground water to use for flood irrigation because fuck you.
There's no profit in building sensible infrastructure.
Only profit in endless wars against brown people
There's lots of profit in building infrastructure. There's little profit in finishing it. That's why in US or UK you get endless construction projects that cost billions but never deliver anything useful.
Car infrastructure has lower up-front costs, but much higher lifetime costs than rail. That's the real profit making scheme here. That, plus you have to buy a car to opt-in, which is a major expense and one that has to be made every 5-15 years.
Good news I almost paid mine off just in time for it to be worthless, I think I had 1.9% at 72 months.
Except there is plenty of profit in the form of increased commerce. Indirect profit is something corporations and government struggles with. Line will go up after this is built. Which takes more than a fucking quarter
They actively don't want that. That means someone else is getting credit for their political capital, and as we all know it's a zero sum game: if someone else is winning, you're losing
More like three and a half hours if you want an actually usefull line that stops.at places where people wanna stop at and you add the time needed to accelerate and decelerate but yeah. Also thats calculating with 500kmh which is very much cutting edge and constructing a line like that takes decades BUT that doesnt mean such investments arent worth it and also just fixing transport within a city is already worth it.
China and Japan seem to have figured this shit out. How come the largest economy in the world can't? Pissed about with Elon and his Hyperloop which would be too expensive for any regular person (extreme maintenance costs) and can't move as many people (very limited size). And it didn't even work! Meanwhile elsewhere the train wasn't being reinvented, but improved, and it's actually functional.
Also, you can have high speed transit between two major stations, then take local transit to your specific destination. That's what central stations are supposed to be for.
Musk has openly admitted he propped Hyperloop for the sole purpose of stopping California to build a high speed train. He never intended to deliver anything.
This is one of those moments when I mentally ask "how the fuck is that even legal" but then I remember who writes the rules.
Not openly. He allegedly admitted it to his ghostwriter, behind closed doors, but publicly denies it. He claims it was a misunderstanding, which is plausible.
Which is some real cartoon villain shit
And Elon has not produced a single workable anything, but sucked up billions in subsidies.
Yeahhh but chicago is several large cities away from new york so thats why im saying they would need a stop for each of them. You can of course have commuter trains that skip some of those and others that serve the less used ones of course, and shuttles as well but you also have to consider that chicago and ny are 1100kms away from each other in a straight line while tokyo and kyoto are 370kms from each other in a straight line for example and those are 2 hours by train(and i looked from the train stations which are not in the center of the city tho you could argue they are somewhat but these metropolitan areas are so large that they have multiple city centers) so that means if you just multiply it up you would get that the chicago-ny line would be a six hour journey. This is, of course, probably not correct. Im just trying to show how you cant just draw a straight line between two places and say "Train!". Tho of course you also have to calculate with the fact that the us is much richer than both china and japan but once again that just complicates things again.
Never forget what they took from us. They being the promoters of the ny-chicago electric air line railroad. Also if it were built and the right of way stayed intact we could absolutely build a maglev that could go center to center in 3 hours.
Nobody even considers that a problem for airplanes.
Having to plan connecting flights is a thing.
Of course, we don't just not make direct flights between major cities because other cities are in between.
Plains fly over the obstacles? Thats kinda the point? Also i may have underestimated the amount of people flying in the us cause in europe one flight a day is completely normal for destinations at this distance. Of course if thousands of people want to move between these two locations each day a regular shuttle could make sense but you cant just ignore the distance, 2.5 hourse is a very very best case scenario. Planes can also fly boutta 1000kmh but that doesnt mean a place 1000kms away takes 1 hour, 1.5 to 2 hours is completely normal for a journey like that without accounting for all the flight related hassles. Of course thats a huge upside of trains but you cant just freely apply train to everything. This is very likely a place where a highspeed rail connection would make sense but nothing is ideal instantly. Not to talk about how these cities would have to improve their own public transit to be able to connect to a wider network efficiently.
Literally nobody ever thought we shouldn't make a direct flight route from Chicago to New York because there's other cities people might want to stop at. It's similarly absurd problem to imagine for trains.
planes missing connections is rare and the airlines provide some degree of compensation, Amtrak has no such reputation.
Hyperloop is incredibly stupid on the face of it for so many reasons, the two largest of which IMO actually being that it would be incredibly unsafe as escape would be impossible in case of an incident and that it's literally physically impossible, as the material tolerances required are incompatible with the temperature shifts that happen everywhere on account of weather and seasons.
You can run a multi-stop and an express train concurrently.
In fact, that is the norm.
A thing a lot of people don't understand about high speed rail is that it needs to be very straight and very flat. Draw a straight line from those two cities and count the number of places it goes through, the different elevations and figure out how you'd bulldoze through it all.
China seems to have figured it out in their mountainous regions. Some of the lines are 90% tunnel+raised rails. And as an American we should talk about how China is roughly the same size as America. The excuse well has run dry.
I’m all for high speed rail in the US, but comparing the land area of the two countries is not really that relevant.
China’s network is really focused on about a third of the land area. US could do the same, but the big population hubs are separated and on opposite sides of the country, so it’s less ideal - lot of track to connect the two. It’s like 2-3x the distance to connect LA/NYC vs Chongqing/Shanghai.
China also has 4x the population of the US. So the cost/benefit to build this out is simply much more favorable for china.
Most importantly, China’s autocratic government can clear the red tape to get big projects like this done. Just getting the land rights to build the right track could kill a transcontinental project in the US. But that decision is consolidated in the Chinese government. This cuts time and cost immensely.
None of these points are strong enough to stop the idea of high speed rail in the US. The auto lobby alone does that.
But that's a non issue. If you want to get from LA to NYC, you fly. If you want to get from Chicago to NYC or from LA to San Francisco, you take the HSR... I mean you would if the US had a fully developed transport infrastructure.
I mean sure but it’s the same issue, smaller scale at that point. You slashed the distance, but also the demand.
The big problem is always going to be getting the land anyway
The corridors I mentioned are perfectly fine HSR corridors, the population numbers and distances are great for HSR, perfectly suitable. That is absolutely not the propblem. Developed countries would have already HSR along those corridors, heavily used HSR, that is transformative for the places along it.
The problem is not getting the land, the problem is politics and legislation that is hostile to it and as a consequence it is nigh impossible to get that land for critical infrastructure like that (hostile legislation is also the reason why multiple the times of construction costs have to be paid for non-construction expenses, not even counting land acquisition). Curiously enough it is not impossible to ever widen highways or even build entirely new ones.
Cool cool
Then build a HSR on the east coast and one on the west coast. How about we start with that first?
Then you can worry about the detail that isn’t even that important. Nobody is saying to build HSR coast to coast
Next you are going to tell me it’s not a good solution because of Hawai
Thats why i drew a squiggly line when i calculated this lol
From a network perspective it wouldn't make sense to build a Chicago - New York straight line with 0 stops... You'ld better link up Chicago to Cleveland, probably even do the Detroit detour and continue that in an expensive Appalachian tunnel to Washington DC. Then in a separate project build a high speed rail connecting the east coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington...
If you want to stop at multiple towns, then regular HSR makes sense. Maglev is suitable if you stop at most at Cleveland. (And extend to Minneapolis)
Just bring a non-stop train, a limited stop train and/or a full stop train. It's more expensive, but it's overall better.
Yeah i mention that in a different comment, many cities and countries have systems with full service, shuttle, commuter, etc trains that all serve different modes of transport with the same vehicle(idk how to phrase it exactly). Point is one machine and line(your train in this case) can serve customers demanding different kinds of service by running different schedules.
Also high-speed rail doesn't run at top speed the whole time. You might have a few flat spots here and there, but most of the time it's running much slower.
Also, if there's a problem with a train, the whole rail goes down. If there's a problem with an airplane, the other planes have a whole lot of sky they can still use.
That's not how rail works.
There absolutely are passing places where a train can hop onto the left track and then back again, or just a long stretch of an extra track going parallel to the main route where either the faulty train can sit and wait for repairs, or the working trains can jump around the faulty one.
Source: living in a country that actually has a working passenger railway system.
So only 4000 miles of grade-separated high-speed rail (and all the infrastructure and private property easements, divisions, etc required for the construction) just to connect just these 2 cities? No problem.
You don't connect just those two cities, mate. You connect them as the main artery and then do split-offs to other areas. Or, even better, you weave the main railway between major cities East-to-West to connect them directly.
If you think that's ludicrous, may I present Interstate 80?
What are you talking about? Chicago-NYC are maybe 1200 km, perfectly within HSR distance and definitely within Maglev distance. The two urban areas are also huge enough to support such a thing, especially as there are a few mid sized urban areas in between.
we'll be saying this 200 years from now
This passing problem was solved a long time ago, it's just that the freight rail corps in the US have "optimized" for trains that are longer than the passing rail sections. It's extremely bad for the entire rail industry and the cause of many of the derailments and accidents, but because capital always gets its way in the US, nothing significantly has changed to resolve the issue.
It's very frustrating how often there are perfectly workable solutions to making the world better, but if it doesn't have a fat profit margin, it just gets strangled to death by capital interests in this country.
Aviation is grounded way more often than rail corridors are blocked. You'd know if you'd ever had lived in a place with developed infrastructure.
Also, yes, HSR built on dedicated high speed infrastructure, like the TGV or Shinkansen, does run most of the time close to max speed.
I have the utmost confidence in the TSAs ability to make rail stations just as bad as airports.
American here, we're dumb.
Most people don't even know that dumb has a 'b'
He's trying to make his followers feel better, match their energy so he doesn't come across as an elite billionaire
or he just learned about the B in dumb
Honestly I'd give shit like that a pass, silent letters are stupid and sometimes don't even exist in certain spellings for the same word looking at you soder, sodder, solder. Also if anyone brings up the l in solder being pronounced, not in my dialect nor in most other older dialects I've encountered only the ones wherein they reromanticized random words.
Bro's starting out with ethnocentrism and ends with it full circle "reromanticized"
Impressive performance, I envy
How is that ethnocentric? I'm a Californian Redneck barely a culture and sure as shit not a ethnicity. My point was to moreso directly shit on the English in particular who reintroduced the l pronunciation and indirectly caused a bunch of random fuckers to get pissy with me. In hindsight I probably should specified, regardless I am unfamiliar with any dialect pre 1900s who pronounced the l in solder.
We pronounce it in Australia
Pretty sure you guys were effected by the reromanticized effect, that broadly speaking started around the 1850s or so in England though wasn't fully finalized until about the 1970s or so. Solder was just one of the more unified examples of a word being effected due to it being rarely used outside of blacksmiths up until the industrial revolution and it being a relatively easy thing to assume the l was pronounced by the developing metal working tradesmen unless the region had the soder or sodder spellings instead of with the traditional spelling.
Who cares? The point is that the spelling is better for us now. Dialects exist. Universalising English is stupid.
Oh most certainly but also I'm going to take every moment to shit on anything and everything the English aristocracy has ever done if it's even the least bit stupid. I will shed the blood of Saxon men.
I reckon there are probably more valuable way to spend your energy than on policing spelling.
Its all the lead in the pipes, it makes the frogs gay with all the chemtrail fallout on this flat earth being watched by Jewish space laser satellites.
Why use mass transit when AI transit do trick?
You joke, but California's high speed rail is looking into renting capacity to AI.
We're dumb? I though we were winning!
These trains would run at capacity all the time, being full of New Yorkers going to Chicago to get good pizza and immediately returning.
New Yorkers: 😠
Italians: 😠
Hawaians: 🍍
Everyone else: 😠 (for some reason everybody looks very invested in the pizza debate)
I like your boldness anyway
Be ungovernable.
🤢🤮
Hawaiian pizza is Canadian
It could have been invented in North Korea and I'd still love it.
No wonder they say sorry so much
Deep pan, thin crust, round, square, folded, oily and greasy, masterpiece renaissance gluten art, who cares, it's all good!
Be a pizza slut, not a pizza prude!
Pizza is pizza. But Chicago style is a casserole. They should just call it a Chicago casserole to avoid confusion. I can't imagine the fury of someone ordering a pizza and getting a bread bowl of marinara sauce instead.
chicago has two types of pizza, the 'deep dish' you're referring to, and the thin and crispy (tavern-style) cut in squares. pretty much only tourists eat the deep dish. locals usually go for the thin crust, maybe the other once a year.
fuck, I miss those thin crust Chicago tavern-style pizzas, and I've never even visited Chicago! I can't seem to find any good ones withing a reasonable distance from where I live in a medium-sized city in a very major metropolitan area. It's very frustrating.
Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada... by a Greek guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza
that’s not pizza, that’s casserole
https://youtu.be/pzXIpp59eoU
I hope one day the rest of the world will learn that Chicago deep dish is a gimmick, and what people in Chicago just call "pizza" is a completely different thing that's way better.
What Americans call pizza in general is already a completely different thing, discussions if it's better or worse completely aside.
And Chicagoans going for ny style cuz no one wants to eat a casserole everytime they eat pizza
The one form of pizza I refuse to acknowledge is deep dish. It’s a tomato pepperoni stew in a bread bowl with too much cheese.
Whaaaaaa? 🤯
I know! The words are grammatical English, but make no discernible sense whatsoever.
That is a fucking casserole.
It must be incredibly sad to go through life oblivious to the existence of pies.
And a shitty casserole at that. Because a good casserole has cheese on the top.
Shitcago style.
BigOil would like to have a word.
They have all the words. That's why we don't have shit like this and seemingly never will.
Elon would like to have a word
Meanwhile, Musk is at it again, pitching a hyperloop tunnel to link Austin and San Antonio. Nevermind that it’s a ton of limestone and aquifers along that route.
How's that Vegas loop working? Last I heard it's faster to walk.
But how else am I going to show off my $60k+ 4x4 with $12k+
useless junkmodifications during my once-a-year trip to a national park?Since this is directed at the American people asking why they don't have or want this, they do. They have for decades. Just as an example look at the history of high speed rail in Florida. It was put to a public vote on the ballot at least once, overwhelming voted for, and the politicians said (laughingly)... "Oh no. No, we can't afford to do the will of the people. Sorry." Then spent the same amount elsewhere probably. So, that's why.
Florida passed it once, under Jeb Bush, who was against it, and simply said No. The voters wanted it bad enough that they voted on it again, and passed it with wide bipartisan support, because it was a no-brainer. Private funds were going to build it, and cover all construction overruns. Then they would operate it for a decade, to get it running, then once it had 10 years of experience under its belt, it would be handed over the state to run, presumably at a profit by then. It would have been the root of a high speed rail system that would run up the east coast, and then start spreading west. It wasn't going to cost the taxpayers a penny, and everybody wanted it, which is why it passed TWICE!
Jeb was dragging his feet, and then Convicted Criminal Rick Scott got elected, and immediately killed it, despite NEVER mentioning in his campaign a single time. It outraged people so badly, that there was talk of a recall, but it turns out the Florida legislature had passed a law prohibiting recalls, after Jeb Bush helped his brother cheat his way into the presidency in 2000. He must have been worried that the Democrats would come after him for cheating, but he vastly overestimated the Democrats courage.
So Convicted Criminal Rick Scott got elected, and killed the high speed rail deal, but by the end of his second term, he allowed a new normal speed rail line between Miami and Orlando that nobody uses, because why would they?
Oh, and by the way, Convicted Criminal Rock Scott had a 3% investment stake in the NEW rail line. He didn't have any investment in the one he killed, that everybody wanted. Which explains everything you need to know about Convicted Criminal Rick Scott, who will be running for president in 2028. He wants to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and ALL social safety nets, and every word he says is a lie, his ONLY priority is using his office to increase his net worth, he LOVES insider trading and loudly opposes any restrictions on it, and every word he says is a lie.
Edit: And despite all of his condemnations of "career politicians," he's made every penny of his fortune off the government, including a massive Medicaid fraud scheme that formed the foundation of his fortune.
Before that, he was in the Navy, and after that he was a politician, which he has done since 2011, when he bought the Florida governor's office. Nothing like starting at the top.
He also runs on Term Limits, of course, they all do.
I can confirm this is pretty accurate. I voted for the high speed rail twice as did most people because it was a great idea and would have worked surprisingly well in FL. The repeated line of shitbag evil governors and their majority in the state congress stopped anything good from happening and allowed the continued grifting.
I know right? Instead lets keep turning the highway to hell into a parking lot everyday for no reason.
Wow, this is the perfect encapsulation of how democracy is broken
of how capitalism is broken
FTFY
In Florida, it only gets done if it funnels money to established GoP donors. On the off chance something gets funded that they can't steal from, it gets shut down ASAP.
This is doable, we just have to convince our leaders is bad for the environment, will hurt brown people, will get them filthy rich and also paint them fake gold and put Drumpfs name on each train
So yea, no,
Fucking AI an image of a gold train with Trump's name on the side and get it trending.
We can always repaint it in a couple of years.
That's actually worth a try.
The biggest issue is that it's expensive and what we have now is functional. People aren't keen on dropping tons of cash to make something better because they're short-sighted and don't care about the future.
Also NIMBY's would shut it down hard, not wanting to live near the rail. There'd also be a lot of eminent domain claims when the rail would get close to any station point.
Back when the US had excellent rail networks, we could have upgraded and maintained them for passenger rail. But so much has been ripped out and paved over that it'd be very expensive to bring it back... and no one wants to pay more in taxes despite receiving more money back in benefit.
I get your point about how our existing transportation system is functional. I mean, it's not, but it's functional enough that people and policymakers can point to it and claim that it's good enough. We can't point to all of the trips that aren't happening because our system is so godawful exactly because they're not happening.
I just think of Amtrak's Borealis route from Minneapolis to Chicago. It's not terribly convenient (2 trains a day), nor that fast (7½ hours), nor all that cheap (close to $50), and it has blown ridership projections completely out of the water. A lot of people really want to take the train, and I understand, because the alternatives (driving or flying) are so much worse.
I have plenty of friends who'd love a train to Chicago. The Illinois Central route is still in use for freight. But Wisconsin just can't get it together to offer passenger service. Beyond NIMBYs, as we saw in the campaign for governor in 2010, rail has become a political identity issue, coded as Democratic, so Republicans are reflexively against it. As well, it's a racist dog-whistle, as seen in the bizarro claims that a train would bring Chicago crime to the city.
It's functional in that people can get from point A to point B when they need to. Flights aren't prohibitively expensive enough to push people to take the tax increase. A flight from Minneapolis to Chicago is like $100-$200, and for the rare occurrence someone needs that specific route, it's not that expensive to pay for.
Don't get me wrong, we'd be much better off with a national rail network connecting major cities. But Americans are some of the most cost-averse voters, both on the left and right. And you're looking at a multi-billion dollar project for something like a Chicago to NYC line. The citizens of Illinois and NYC aren't keen to take the tax hike. Fed won't pay for it since it only benefits 2 specific voter bases and doesn't do anything to swing an election (Dems win those cities anyway, Republicans will never take them over even if they funded rail).
Agreed that it's functional in that people can get from point A to point B, but just throwing in that are a lot of people who nevertheless don't make trips because those trips are harder and more stressful than they need to be. (Elderly and disabled people, and children, as some examples.) As well, our system requires lots of trips that people don't want, or shouldn't need, to make.
$50 from Minneapolis to Chicago isn't cheap?
In my mind, I compare it to the Amtrak 30-day pass that I paid $600 for, and went all the way around the western half of the U.S.
What we have now is not functional. And you will never convince me that we somehow don't have enough money to make the average American's life better, but somehow we have the money to spend 43.6 billion, so far, on a pointless war with Iran. We have the money
The problem isn't that it can't happen, the problem is people won't vote to pay more in taxes. Left or right, we've shown that any candidate that runs on increasing taxes gets slaughtered because the voter base is too short sighted. New rail is incredibly expensive, taxes would need to be increased to pay for it (the money HAS to come from somewhere).
It's "functional" in that people can get from Chicago to NYC relatively quickly - through a flight. Sure, it's gonna cost a few hundred $$ a person, but it's not enough of a barrier to get people to pay significantly more in taxes for a few years to pay for an alternative.
The federal government isn't going to step in and do something like this ever either. They're the only ones who could even conceivably do this, but spending billions for 2 specific states doesn't sway voters from the other 48.
You missed the point. We do not have to increase taxes to achieve this. We just have to stop bombing the shit out of half the world and reallocate that funding.
Our taxes could stay exactly the same. Of course the lobbyists prefer we spend billions and billions on pointless wars and the military, but we don't get shit from it.
Only if the federal government paid for it, and they won't for the reasons I mentioned. No use catering to a vote they already have.
I don't like it any more than you do, but it's a massive side effect of the way our government works. Swing states are the only things that matter and none of them are in need of high speed rail
We may not have a functional rail system, but we have an excellent highway system, and there is absolutely no reason that high speed rail lines can't be run down the medians of many highways, eliminating much of the eminent domain issues.
There will still be pain points, but that's the challenge of progress. A national High Speed Rail system would be worth the trouble.
I personally agree, but the voter base doesn't. People are unwilling to take the tax increase over taking a flight for the rare occurrence they go between the two cities. And the issue is getting INTO the city, not near the city. Once you hit the suburbs of either city you're fucked. Not that it can't be done, but the price tag skyrockets and that makes it a harder pill for voters to swallow.
Yikes this comment section got flooded by car brains making some wild fucking claims.
Easy, we're idiots.
We just foot the bills, we don't select the items.
Well… you must remember, they are Ameicans, trains are COMMUNISM!
Also, the train might bring darker-skinned individuals to my neighborhood. Can't be having that.
/sI forgot to downvote your comment for the screenshot. Oh well. You get the joke.
Won't someone think of the poor oil profits 🤣🤣
But, but, but, trains are communism!
Seriously, though, far too many Americans still tie their identity to their vehicle. The stupid notion of rugged American individualism has really held the country back.
There are plenty of other things, but I'm just pointing out this one.
Fuck cars, but not train cars, right?
Ughh this comment section. Americans are so dumb?m, and yes I speak for myself as well. We have been so propagandized my exemptional individualism that when we’re presented with something that could benefit all of we turn and run. It’s so god damn stupid.
Why would I, a Chicago resident, want to go to nyc
But that would mean admitting china is miles ahead.
Other than the NIMBY-ism, lawyers all looking to make a shitload of money off the taxpayer by looking for reasons to delay the project, and the anti-mass transit attitude the US has…just look at the California high speed rail project mired in legal grifting for instance.
There’s generic American “we fuck up nice things becuase fuck the rules” attitudes. You can have nice high-speed rail in places like Europe or Japan, or high speed driving on segments of the Autobahn, because society has enough sense to not fuck it up. They’re not parking tractor trailers or cars on rail intersections causing crashes on rail like we have all the time in the US. People generally obey rules like keeping right unless passing, or not blocking the passing lane in Europe. In several shopping areas and airports they have people movers without steps that are ramps betwen floors. In the US it would be a very short period between the installation and some fool riding a skateboard or bike down the ramp and hurting themselves or other people - then come the lawsuits. Someone would probably punch an idiot trying to do that in Europe.
So yeah. Even if we could muster the political balls to build such a needed rail, and get the money for it (because it would have to be profitable of course), some jackass would light the track on fire, park a car on it, or who knows what other dumbassery, because fuck nice things.
GREED
The fingers thing means.... Greed?
It means money.
EXBLAIN
XD Also, I'm a car enthusiast and I love them, but fuck cars. I'd love it if I could just walk everywhere but nah, cuz 'MURICA.
It's simple. We're being robbed.
Speed ideology
I find the hardest issue with trains is getting to the smaller side destinations. I guess you're still gonna need a small car or bike for that of course. Plus I'm used to semi rural so I'd still have to drive a few miles to even get on the train to go somewhere. And it wouldnt make any sense for going to a friends house for example.
No idea how it works really. Plus I'm almost always hauling gear to a destination so a train wouldnt work for me anyway. Going to get groceries is about the only thing I'd use it for and I wouldnt be able to carry an entire cartload.
Commuter trains in Europe and Asia have dedicated spaces for riders to store stuff they need to haul. People in my city bring entire truckloads of stuff on board the dedicated freight spaces at the end of each train car.
Ive never seen that but that makes sense !
Think of it as mixed-mode transport. Here's how it's done in much of Europe:
But honestly though it sounds like your situation (rural, often transporting bulky things) calls for a car. But the point is that reducing the number of cars on the road helps the remaining drivers too.
Thank you for clarifying, I totally agree with that solution.
Less suburban hellscape designs would help too, in the US.
Yeah but you have what you have. I don't think it's viable to just destroy suburbia either. Narrowing roads to add proper walking/biking paths, adding some stores/services and public transit would go some of the way.
For sure
I think you're imagining that the suggestion being put forward is that they'd just build that one train line, and everything else would stay exactly the same?
Haha no, that would be rediculous. I'm just saying its very hard to imagine my life with trains and how that actually factors into daily life.
The only time ive been on trains/subways is vacationing to big cities, where I still had a rental car but parked far from the city and rode the train in. That was fine and all for touristy things.
For 98% of people in huge cities I can see it. For every person I know IRL, it would not work. The suburban nightmare alone with people with 4 kids trying to get them to school alone wouldnt work. You'd basically have to tear down and rebuild all of suburbia. Not that I'm opposed to that, just leave me out of the city myself.
That's the same with airports. And actually no big deal if you have working public transport. You arrive in the city center. And then there are local trains, street cars and busses to bring you into every part of the city or to nearby smaller towns
Yep makes sense !
you can put an airstrip almost anywhere, train tracks cost significantly more.
You can't put an international airport anywhere and there may be some flights going to smaller airports from that, but there are no airstrips in your local suburbs?
look at a map of "airports" around anchorage like this one, and you will see plenty is the vaguely suburp shaped outskirts
Alaska really is not the area you want to look into.
It's where I am, and is by far the largest state.
It's all because of Big Road.
the air line business lobbest against this all the time. if this was a thing in the USA the air line industry would collaps.
I don’t even care if we built high speed trains that go that fast in the US. I just wish our rail system was more extensive and prioritized passenger trains over freight trains, which they are required to by law but isn’t enforced.
Many reasons, all of them stupid and/or depressing.
Many are downstream from racism.
Wow. Now that's something I would very much want my tax money go to, any day at any country
Sorry. Best we can do is shoot millions of dollars of missiles into elementary schools.
Nope, they don't. And most of them refuse to believe you when you tell em.
Michelle, Tamika, and Tonya wanna ride this train.
Fascism is fully invested in genocide.
Getting the property and easements is probably the hardest part, especially when the will is presumably there for the urban hubs. Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Pittsburgh, etc. on to New York on a shinkansen would be awesome but, especially in the city, they're never getting all the land to even start. It would also presumably need to be elevated like the shinkansen here in japan
Biggest issue is getting all the palms greased. Red tape disappears when money gets funnels to donors. They'll straight up eminent domain peoples houses if the right billionaire is getting their cut.
This is true, but I do have compassion for the people who would lose their homes and businesses, especially if they're pensioners or on fixed income. Especially for older folks, moving away from support networks can be traumatic, so I would hope there is a good solution there (though I'm not sure what that would be other than huge amounts of cash).
They would put in the airport hassle.
Americans couldn't realize that having a child rapist as their head of state was a bad thing.
You’re acting like this isn’t every world leader at this point. Ffs look at the rest of the world.
We have so much lower hanging fruit than this on the NE corridor. But the US has forgotten how to build any infrastructure that isn't a highway. Conventional HSR at 300kmh would do wonders for the NE corridor if we could get it built somehow.
The current Lake Shore Limited route is 1,543 km. Doing that in 2.5 hours requires an average speed of 617 km/hr. At TGV top speeds of 320 km/hr it is a 4.8 hour trip.
As far as I know, 600 km/hr requires the development of additional technology not in operational use in other countries.
It would make less money doing the same amount of work, and in America we only want to generate value for the share holder.
I didn't even know that was an option, but don't want to get my expectations up.
Can it also do heavy freight?
Lot of people have car brain real bad in the US.
Shit is so far apart here it's more difficult and expensive to connect the cities. It 100% should be done but instead we need to reeeealy invest in city infrastructure around data centers right now. Sowwy
Imagine the new residential and commercial opportunities (and taxes) along that rail as well. Oh well, will never happen as long as republicans are alive and voting.
Just tell them it is for AI.
Canada is basically a straight line and also lacks it :(
Americans get the government they deserve. Apparently they don't deserve much atm
😢
1270km, 2.5h, so 500km/h avg?
Just no.
a viable high speed rail system is more than just the trains.
its the rails.. and most the rail in america is owned by private freight companies. freight companies who don't like sharing their rail with passenger trains, and probably wholly unsuitable for high speed trains to begin with.
So you'd have to build your own stations, and lay your own rail, which.. if you want the trains to go anywhere useful, is probably going to involve enough land buyouts and eminent domain as to take up 95% of the budget of any rail plan.
But realism aside, it'd be fuckin wonderful if we could have a national high speed rail network that you could jump on to go almost anywhere.
Funny how the country can eminent domain your property to build a road or a transmission line, but they seem to not be able to eminent domain this nice rail system
Also we have spent an insane amount of money, 43.6 billion so far, fighting a pointless war in Iran. Yet it's unrealistic to spend money on rail
cause billionaires arent pushing for high speed rail, which is why theres no motive to do it. . because the American government is a government of the rich, for the rich.
roads are flexible and can me moved if they encounter sufficient resistance, same with transmission lines. Rail needs to be straight.
So make them straight, like wow it's not hard
going straight through rich neighborhoods is expensive because reasonable people will delay their house being destroyed with their money.
Wow, thats a 12 hour drive!
I believe...
The US economy is based on spending as much possible as a consumer. Rather than focusing on infrastructure to improve livelihood, the aim is have endless construction and maintenance for as many people as possible. Everybody needs a car, or else you cannot safely travel(in the normal-ass suburbs where I grew up it was an hour walk to the grocery store, few pedestrian crossings for highways, and there plenty of sidewalks that simply ended due to gated communities or neighboring towns or villages that simply didn't to build some twords there edges). Each car will need to be taxed, registered, sold, bought, insured, fixed, fueled, towed, fined, accessorised, and finally scrapped and sold again in peices. If there was good public transportation, then less money would be changing hands, and the economy would look less impressive..
I don't think that was original reason, but I'm certain it's on the minds of modern economists now
While we spent 20 years, and 7 trillion bucks, losing wars in the Middle East, China built a nationwide high speed rail system from scratch, and eliminated most poverty in their country.
We just got out of one 20 year quagmire, and now Trump gets us right into another one. Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, etc. all LOVE it though.
We have the money to do anything we want in this country - free health care, college/trades, pre-k, etc., but the people we elect on both sides prefer to waste it on Wars, and policies that help the ultra-wealthy, which is Wars.
Someone said "trains" and America thought they said "trans."
this must be the hyperloop I've heard so much about
trains don't have much less hassle than planes in this country
High-way expansion is flattening areas, throwing oil and rock down, doing signage and some guard rails.
High speed rail is precision architecture, requiring seizing property from owners and fighting every town that doesn't want the train coming through or stopping.
It's not like we have a great rail network to upgrade. We're struggling to keep what freight rail we have operational.
You can fly from Chicago to NYC for $100 You can rail from Chicago to NYC for $70 on current architecture. You can bus from Chicago to NYC for $80
That's a 12 hour drive. Those "highway expansions" aren't being driven by people trying to drive 12 hours. Nor to they cost enough to build a high percision train line.
In no fossil fuel world does completing a multi-billion dollar rail project make it cheaper and faster than the existing flights.
Imagine installing a new line from scratch, from the center of Madrid to Paris. can't reuse any existing lines, you need to mow down any homes or businesses in the way and fight every town on the way through.
You speak as if highways don't also need to seize property and destroy shit in the way to be built.
We build relatively few new highways, they're generally lane addition projects. Baltimore has added 2-3 lanes N,S and Beltway without taking any additional land beyond the stuff done in the early 1900's.
They've been trying to put a maglev in between DC and NYC for decades https://www.thebanner.com/community/transportation/northeast-maglev-high-speed-train-canceled-DDIKXTC5SZDM7IIGS2SPLEKDKQ/
It's not like we're not trying.
They seize it from poor people, is that what you want but on a massive fucking level?
poor people don't tend to fight, but trains can't easily avoid the not broke areas because of the whole "Can't make sharp turns" thing.
The freight industry is a huge source of the problems in the US rail system. It should not be able to run trains longer than the passing sections, but it does it anyway because "it reduces labor costs". Running longer trains is terrible from an engineering perspective.
Most of our freight rails are so poorly maintained that even passenger traffic has to slow in areas. Primary rail use here is freight.
I wonder what happens when a train traveling at 320mph hits deer.
Or a bird if it’s elevated tracks.
I can’t imagine this is good for the train.
TSA would make it take 3 hrs to get through security and every state transport agency would funnel so much money to the mob that each ticket would cost $4k and you'd still have your seat cancelled due to overbooking.
We don't know how to make and have nice things.
edit:if the trains were faster the cost would make sense. if that 20 hour amtrak ride was actually 2.5 hours like the planes to get from the middle of the us to the east cost of the us, then the 194$ train ticket vs 98$ (minimum you could find is probably like 98$ you’re more or less looking at like 120$/plane ticket) plane ticket would make sense.
Flying: The fastest and most popular mode of travel. Over 50 daily nonstop flights operate between NYC airports (LGA, JFK, EWR) and Chicago airports (ORD, MDW), with flight times averaging roughly 2.5 hours.
Amtrak Train: The Lake Shore Limited runs direct daily service between New York Penn Station and Chicago Union Station, taking approximately 19 to 20 hours.
Round-trip flight prices from New York to Chicago start around $232, and one-way tickets start around $84 to $113 on platforms like Google Flights.
it's around 198$ one way for new york to chicago, amtrak.
*it's not cost feasible to sleep next to your bathroom on amtrak for 20 hours for 200$. *
Amtrak’s annual cost for fuel, power, and utilities is roughly $330 million to $336 million based on recent fiscal year reports. 2024-2025 report https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/financial/Amtrak-Audited-Consolidated-Financial-Statements-FY2025.pdf
The total global airline spending on jet fuel is estimated at roughly $291 billion. source: https://blog.openairlines.com/time-is-money-fuel-inefficiency-costs-us-airlines-daily
Yeah, the problem is train tickets are about the same cost as a plane ticket. There's little incentive to choose rail.
It's always a bit ridiculous seeing posts about public transport, from the country which doesn't know public transport. Claim and picture of this post are accordingly ridiculous. This isn't public transport, this is a pipe dream.
The US environment, systems, and societies are not conducive to HSR. You will see widespread cheap electric flights before you see HSR. Here's a good video explaining why: https://youtu.be/753xlF0EWsI
Basically the land costs way more, it's viewed as business that needs to profit, not infrastructure you spend on, and you cant bulldoze over people as cheaply to make the necessary routes.
My feeling is that widespread high speed rail will never take off in America there are too many barriers. Two that come to mind that will delay and increase the cost to prohibitive levels are Private Land acquisition and Environmental assessments and preservation laws.
What I think will be a more realistic "High speed Rail" option for the US is using existing infrastructure in new ways. Something like fully automated cars, where each car is similar to a rail car and the connection between cars is digital not physical.
Do non-Americans not realize that not everything is 700 miles away?
And how much will it cost in time and money to get rights of way from Chicago to NYC for this fancy railroad?
A week if the government had balls
We’d need a completely different government for that
Gosh it's almost like you guys have a system encoded into your constitution specifically designed to fix that
Which is why Cali has a beautiful and efficient HSR system because it’s so easy to use eminent domain.
The system encoded in the constitution is slavery. Literally concocted by enslavers to violently enforce their privilege.
What, exactly are you talking about that you think is "encoded" into our constitution to allow us to completely replace our government with a new government? I really can't think of anything that fits that. You're either talking about Article V, which allows for constitutional amendment (but that is NOT a system for fixing the a need for an entirely different government) or you're talking about the 2nd Amendment (again, not what you're talking about) and that would be a VERY different way of achieving those results. Either way, I'm confused about what you mean.
Or are we just operating on different concepts of what the word "government" means in this context? FYI, when most Americans say, "new government" they mean an entirely new political system, not a change in administration. We would just say, "administration" for that.
An entirely different social structure, to be honest.
And we’d have to rebuild a lot of the cities.
It doesn't really matter, if done properly, the return on investment would be absolutely massive.
The ridiculous bullshit is that the Lakeshore Limited already goes from Chicago to New York, but hits its maximum speed of 180km/h on a few stretches of track in the east that Amtrak owns. It averages only about 60km/h for the whole trip. That's because the freight companies don't care to maintain their tracks for high speed, since freight service doesn't need it.
I'm still pissed at Pres. Biden threw the rail workers unions under the train, when he should've protected the economy by nationalizing the rails to establish leverage over the corporations, instead. It would have had so many knock-on benefits to the nation.
The rights of way already exist for the most part. The whole nation was built on railways. Most are just cargo only, and many have been converted to bike/foot paths.
Alternatively, interstate highway rights of way could be used.
They’re not built correctly for high speed rail. Turns are too sharp, grades are too high. You need new ones for this.
The bribes, or the actual cost of the land?
The bribes, the land, the lawyers, the cops dragging people away, all of it.
The train horse left the barn long ago. It's not going to happen.
Horse barn ship man camera
Mister sandman
Man me a sand
Make him the sandiest man with hands
I really don't get this pro train community. Cars are much more convenient. U can haul multiple Things. Kids, griceries, furniture - this is not easily replaceable with trains.
And Nobody commutes from Chicago to nyc