My father told me a story about discontinuing a street car line (called an interurban) in a town North of Detroit. There was a hearing at city hall and hundreds of villagers turned out.<p>Dozens of people made the case to keep the line. Finally the street car company's lawyer got up and made the business case for discontinuing the line. He concluded by asking the crowd how many of you used our company's street car to get to this meeting? Not a single hand went up.<p>It's easy to tell a pollster you're for high speed rail but how many will actually buy a ticket? Perhaps they should ask for them to prepay for a ticket?
Years ago I thought the idea of regional high speed rail lines in the US was a great idea, but I think the time for that has come and gone. The future seems to be clearly moving towards autonomous cars (and buses one presumes). Why sink billions into high speed rail when on our current pace it will be only a couple decades before we have all electric cars powered by solar and other clean energy sources that are 90 something percent autonomous? I think most people would easily choose a 5 hr autonomous car ride from LA to SF with complete freedom of movement in both cities compared to a 2 hr train ride with possibly a couple hours in both cities dealing with connections getting you to your specific destinations.
Be weary of statistics asking people what they might do if something were available vs what they actually do when it's there. Because then you have to factor in the schedules, the ticket price, etc. It doesn't cost anything to answer yes to a poll, it's a bit more complicated when it's time to plan a trip and shell the money out.
I'd prefer a more modest speed rail that went from where I am to somewhere I want to go. It does no good at all to travel at high speeds somewhere else, when all that saved time is more than lost trying to get from else to where I want to go.<p>I'd even prefer slower rail to my car, because I can read on the train, and I don't have to spend 5-10 min parking.
> To be more exact here, 63% of those surveyed stated an interests in utilizing high-speed rail service if it was available.<p>That's asking the wrong question, though. The issue is not so much whether people would, in the abstract, have an interest in using high-speed rail as a hypothetical means of transportation. The first challenge is figuring out <i>where</i> to place the rail - trains can only travel on tracks, so the train routes need to connect highly-trafficked (source, dest) pairs in order to be useful. And the second challenge is figuring out how to do this for a price that justifies the costs. (Even if the project is taxpayer funded, the costs include the opportunity cost - what other projects that tax money could have been spent on).<p>Two-thirds of Americans would use high-speed rail if it connected their home city with their most frequently-visited destination city. But that's not the same as saying that two-thirds would use high-speed rail if it connected, say, LA and SF, or NYC and DC. The question is, would enough people use <i>those</i> routes in order for the project to justify its costs?<p>The question isn't entirely useless - for example, if only 1% of the country demonstrated an interest in using high-speed rail, we could probably stop there. (Even if it connected NYC and LA, the two largest cities, there's no way the traffic would cover the opportunity cost of the project). But as stated, this survey tells us pretty much nothing new - we already knew that there's an abstract interest in high-speed rail, but what we <i>don't</i> know is how to convince people that we have a cost-effective way of building out the tracks between the most-important destination hubs[0].<p>[0] We sort of do know what the most-important destination hubs are, because it's not <i>that</i> different from the most-trafficked Amtrak routes and flight routes in a given region. Yes, you can make the argument that high-speed rail rail should serve the areas that aren't currently well-served by other transportation means, but keep in mind that those also tend to be the less-populated areas to begin with, which means that the challenge of recouping the costs of the project is even greater.
Two criticisms of the map:<p>1. A high speed line down the California coast is totally impractical. Mountains, granite and huge grade changes make for an expensive proposition.<p>2. The broken links in the midwest between the network in Texas/Oklahoma with that stemming from Chicago is silly. Their are mothballed Rights-of-Way there that are perfect alignments for HSR.<p>Outside that, I'm still very much interested in a way to make HSR work in a number of areas for the US.
I'm always confused by the high-speed rail numbers. Exactly how many trains would it take to get 2/3 of the US population using rail?<p>Take the average international-sized airport runway. It can land a 747 every couple minutes. That's hundreds of people every minute. A high-speed rail line cannot take even a fraction of that number. The trains cannot run at speed without significant time/distance between them. That's the limit of one-dimension travel (rail) v the three dimensional world of aircraft. It would take dozens of parallel rail lines to replace even a medium sized airport. While we all might want to use rail for some journeys, I don't see it ever competing with air travel in the US market.
There was a previous article[0]/discussion[1] on HN that contained a similar map of proposed high speed rail lines. This previous map made less sense because it encouraged building out new HSR lines across the vast expanses on the American midwest.<p>I like this new map better though - HSR makes the most sense for medium-distant transit. The Mid-Atlantic/New England area is a perfect example of a region where a lot of mid-distance travel happens. The current rail lines are okay but not fantastic and improved lines would be a positive for travelers.<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-for-america.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-f...</a>
[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506446" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506446</a>
This would seem pretty clear when California voters (notorious for not voting in taxes or bonds) approved the high speed rail project. What was even more interesting were the forces that came out against it and how they have acted.
It would help people who fly too.<p>One thing that struck me living in Europe was that flying was much cheaper and easier and I think competition with rail was a big part.
Well, they are currently breaking ground on high speed rail in California. We may get this question answered in actual fact in the not too distant future instead of in some hypothetical study.<p>Anyone have any ideas for how to help make it successful? I would love to have better transit options because I have no plans to drive a car ever again.
It really kind of fascinates me why people are so obsessed with rail and high speed rail. What are the emotional reasons for it, because there are no rational and reasonable arguments for it that can't be refuted. It makes absolutely no sense and strikes me as another one of those examples of obsessive thoughts and ideal people have these days. It's like all the shitty education we subjected people of roughly <35 years old to are starting to bear shitty rotten and mutated fruits.