Why high speed rail hasn’t caught on

What I find odd about this is that... Trains are the go-to means of intercity transport across much of Europe.<p>The term &quot;High speed rail&quot; isn&#x27;t strictly defined, but seems to kick in somewhere between 110 and 155 mph. Pretty much every intercity train in the UK is running at 125mph for at least some of their journey. Europe is full of functioning high speed rail networks - TGV, ICE, Eurostar, networks in Spain and Italy. If you include 125 mph networks then there&#x27;s loads of them - and those older, slower high speed networks have more or less been profitable.<p>Even the US has a high speed rail corridor in the North East.<p>The author tries to make the argument that there&#x27;s physical limits to high speed rail that mean it&#x27;ll never catch on. But the limits are far more political than physical.<p>If you live in the UK or Europe, rail is <i>the</i> go to method of travel between cities.<p>Edit to add: the distance between LA and San Francisco is 382 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as between either London and Edinburgh and London and Glasgow. There&#x27;s something like 22 trains a day on each route - more or less every half hour during the day. The time from city centre to city centre is better by train than plane or driving. That&#x27;s not even a proper &quot;high speed&quot; train - the routes they follow were laid out in the 1800s.

Riding the high-speed rail in China made me so envious of that setup. If we had that in certain locations in the U.S., it would be absolutely amazing. You just show up a half hour before your train (gotta get there earlier in certain huge stations) and basically walk on. The train ride is buttery smooth with a lot of space, and you can order food from the next station to be delivered to you if you don&#x27;t want any of the food available directly on the train. And with USD, first class and the even higher end business class is not just attainable but cheap. The equivalent train rides with Amtrak in the U.S. are twice as long and several times as expensive and uncomfortable.<p>Edit: Did some searching and found the North Atlantic Rail initiative. According to the article I read, it would take 20 years to build. What a joke. What is going on in the U.S. that we can&#x27;t do this stuff?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;secretnyc.co&#x2F;empire-state-building-lights&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;secretnyc.co&#x2F;empire-state-building-lights&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;northatlanticrail.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;northatlanticrail.org&#x2F;</a>

The article seems to be completely littered with factual errors.<p>1. The author says that HSR projects are about a third below passenger projections everywhere. Everyone who has taken the TGV between Bordeaux and Paris, the ICE between Cologne and Frankfurt and many of the other lines in Europe knows that it is trivially not true. The Bordeaux Paris train is often sold out several times a day.<p>2. The author says the SFO to LA line comes at $350m&#x2F;mile which he gives as indication for HSR construction. I don&#x27;t know about the accuracy for the SFO to LA line, but it&#x27;s completely off for general HSR. Even the highest estimate here for a double track HSR line is $2.6m&#x2F;mile here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;compassinternational.net&#x2F;railroad-engineering-construction-cost-benchmarks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;compassinternational.net&#x2F;railroad-engineering-constr...</a><p>3. The author says that 100,000 passengers daily is the SFO to LAX traffic today. If I look at stats for SFO it has around 3M passengers per month, I assume not all are flying to&#x2F;from LA so the number can&#x27;t be right.<p>4. The whole discussion about interruptions is also weird. Yes if a rail line gets interrupted you probably can&#x27;t easily route around it. But it&#x27;s incorrect to say you can always do that in a car, as everyone stuck in a traffic jam can attest to. Also I would like to see some statistics on rail&#x2F;track interruptions vs road interruptions.<p>5. The subsidies discussion also seems weird. He acknowledges that roads and airtravel receive subsidies as well, but then dismisses them because road operation cost are covered by the driver. Sure but maintanance is covered by the state again. Most rail companies would be very profitable if they would not have to pay for the network (admittedly they often don&#x27;t want to let go of that control, because it allows them to keep competition put)<p>I don&#x27;t think I can take any argument so littered with factual errors seriously.

&gt; Despite decades of development, only a handful of routes in Europe operate at anything like airplane-competitive speeds, which for all but the shortest routes, require &gt; 300 km&#x2F;h or &gt; 185 mph.<p>Not really, given massive fixed cost at airplane terminal and airports being typically harder to get to than train station.<p>When I was flying this summer, I was asked to come to airport 150 minutes before planned departure.<p>200 km&#x2F;h train would still be faster for distances of about 700 km.<p>And even for longer routes benefits of comfort, larger possible baggage, lower stress and so on would make it a clear winner.

The author speaks with an authoritative voice and presents the content as facts. Sadly, the article also contains factual errors. For example:<p>&gt; This capacity could also be served by a fleet of just 40 737s [...], of which Boeing makes more than 500 per year. Bought new, this fleet would cost $3.6b, and with a lead time of, at most, a few months.<p>Boeing has a backlog of 4000 planes.[1] Current delivery lead times are 5-10 years, so getting 40 planes within months is ludicrous. Aircraft might be available on shorter timelines from aircraft lenders, but probably not in that timeframe either. It&#x27;s also not what the article argues.<p>This puts a question mark over the content: which parts are actually correct and which are merely presented as fact without any checking?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_and_deliveries" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...</a>

A lot of small things seem &#x27;off&#x27; to me in this piece. After having gone through it, it should really say &quot;in the US&quot; because many parts of it around reasoning and attitudes come off as nonsense for someone living in the &#x27;rest of the world&#x27;. It even feels like a &quot;this is why things should stay as they are&quot;.<p>&gt; airplane-competitive speeds, which for all but the shortest routes, require &gt; 300 km&#x2F;h or &gt; 185 mph.<p>This number feels arbitrary, where did this come from, is it because very very few exist? Looking at the map, &gt; 200 would do just as well and still lend itself to the author&#x27;s point - some exist but not a huge amount. Even taking that point, high enough speed rail is good enough for inter-city travel, it isn&#x27;t meant to be an aircraft replacement, it is an alternative form of travel. You wouldn&#x27;t say that people shouldn&#x27;t drive between cities, because airplanes are faster. It is an alternative form of travel which allows for mass transit, and in using it, you adjust expectations.<p>&gt; Comfort and convenience are other important factors, but there aircraft are also quite competitive.<p>I doubt that, it&#x27;s possible the author flies exclusively in business&#x2F;first class, which is giving them a skewed perception. Aircraft are uncomfortable compared to trains.<p>&gt; Contrast this with aircraft. There are 15,000 airports in the US. Any but the largest aircraft can fly to any of these airports. If I build another airport, I have added 15,000 potential connections to the network. If I build another rail terminal and branch line, at significantly greater cost than an airstrip, I have added only one additional connection to the network.<p>This is completely wrong. Building an airport doesn&#x27;t automatically come with the ability to accept any aircraft. There are a lot of restrictions and regulations around what you can and cannot do with an airport and its associated routes. An &quot;untowered paved strip&quot; has a specific kind of usage which does not include commercial routes, which is what the premise of the post is, so this is a disingenuous, unfair, and misleading comparison.

&gt;I also worked on track-based transport as a levitation engineer at Hyperloop between 2015 and 2018,<p>That&#x27;s a big red flag as anyone with half a brain knew it was bullshit.

Maybe the emphasis on high speed in not necessary. People already seem to love sitting around in all kinds of environments.. bars, watching netflix, or programming for a lot of people here. What if instead of figuring out what kind of rails would be needed to move a train at the speed of flight, we figured out what kind of rails were needed to economically move the equivalent of a first class lounge from Los Angeles to San Francisco in like seven or eight hours... or maybe it&#x27;s an eco cruise ship, or a new bus design. Either way, for a lot of people who board just before 10AM on a Sunday, and watch two NFL games, the net travel time from Los Angeles to San Francisco could be close to 0.. and you can&#x27;t beat that.

Negativity aside, the article makes fair arguments against setting expectations for rail speed too high. The thing is, trains do not have to be faster than 300kph&#x2F;185mph to compete with planes.<p>Modern trains are infinitely more comfortable than modern planes, so they do not need to match planes in travel times. A modern train features silent travel, ample leg room, unpressurized air and no seat belts. Reliability is key and that does require infrastructure investment.<p>Rail infrastructure will always require subsidies but the costs do not have to be astronomical. Meanwhile, the cost of air traffic emissions are carried by society, which can&#x27;t go on much longer.

As someone mentions in one of the article&#x27;s comments, the solution is to &quot;drop down the speed a bit&quot;. I.e. HSR will never be able to compete with airplanes if you take both cost and time into the equation, but lower-speed rail can definitely compete against privately-own cars, which would be a bigger win imo.<p>To take the example of Europe, it&#x27;s much more important to connect a location, by rail, with as many other locations in a radius of 200-300 km, and, even more importantly, to connect those other locations between themselves, than to connect that location by HSR with another one placed at ~1000 km. So, much more important to connect Paris with Caen, Nantes, Rennes, Brest, Reims, Rouen, Troyes, Tours, Orleans, and, more importantly, to connect Nantes with Caen, or Troyes with Tours, or Reims with Rouen, than is to spend the money in order to build a HSR between Paris and Berlin.<p>More to the point, I&#x27;d rather we spend the money to have the French rail network of 1914, which was slower, but which was covering a lot more places, than the French rail network of 2014, which is way faster, but which is covering fewer places. See this reddit thread for the relevant rail maps [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MapPorn&#x2F;comments&#x2F;202ym3&#x2F;evolution_of_the_french_railway_network_from_1910&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MapPorn&#x2F;comments&#x2F;202ym3&#x2F;evolution_o...</a>

The main high cost of high speed rails is that they need to be VERY planar, a thing hard to create and harder to maintain. It&#x27;s easy create a short-length perfectly aligned planar metallic stuff BUT it&#x27;s far harder for very big sizes and rails need to be veeery long, so change veeery little over length.<p>As a result there are many issues in both mere orographic terms and in maintenance terms.<p>Rails are good for applications like non perishable goods transport, they can sustain heavy loads, move them with less energy than others ground means, they are easy to automate, so ideal for mid and long range on-ground logistic.<p>For transporting people the air, yes, I&#x27;m definitively serious, is the best and cheapest solution:<p>- it&#x27;s fast, at least it can be fast, while supporting a wide range of speeds and ranges<p>- it&#x27;s flexible, behind VTOLs&#x2F;STOLs we just need &quot;terminal&quot; infra, the path between them is free<p>- in whole infra terms it demand far less infra to build and maintain than roads and rails<p>You might argue that actually the cheapest STOL is far more expensive than a car, but in resource terms it&#x27;s not. In fuel terms consume more than an equivalent (load capacity) car, for safety demand more entertainment to be sure nothing fails, but just in raw material terms is a damn cheap car, very little steel, less aluminum, a bit of copper, glass, eventually wood and plastic. On scale planes can be on par with cars in final product costs and while we need more energy we do not need complex road infrastructure hard to maintain and evolve. Not really flexible.<p>We do not develop such mean in most of the world just because we need roads anyway to move heavy loads, we already have much of them since centuries etc, but while most disagree it&#x27;s the future. Some know and know most disagree <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.easa.europa.eu&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;dfu&#x2F;uam-full-report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.easa.europa.eu&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;dfu&#x2F;uam-full-...</a> but as any real tech evolution it will happen, it&#x27;s just a matter of time.

The author defines high speed as above some little satisfied threshold.<p>I&#x27;m Spain quite fast rail has replaced planes as the preferred means of travel. Spain, señite being quite &quot;bumpy&quot;, does have the advantage that a hub structure is natural.

This summer I took my first sleeper train, and it opened my eyes. Instead of treating the journey as wasted time, something to optimize away, it makes a lot of sense to me to make the most of it. The need for rushing dissappears and the experience becomes much more enjoyable.<p>Not long after my sleeper train holiday I had to travel from Schiphol Airport for work, where I was expected to be 4 hours before take off. Those 4 hours could have been spent working in a train in a quiet zone, or looking at the scenery pass by.<p>Next time I will try to take a train instead of an airplane.

&gt; Indeed, as far as I know there isn’t a single HSR route anywhere on Earth that operates profitably on ticketing revenue<p>The key part.

The answer is very simple actually. Railroad is a cheap and primitive tech and doesn&#x27;t support anything high speed. Several advancements are pushing track quality toward faster speed and toward the point of convergence where it will cease to be cheap.

The author defines high speed to mema more than a certain never satisfied threshold ...

I&#x27;ve thought about this and there&#x27;s I think another reason coming from combinatorics.<p>Consider a set of n cities.<p>Being able to go from one city to another by plane only requires n airports. However, to have a complete rail network, one needs n (n-1) &#x2F; 2 tracks.<p>Hence the complexity analysis: one solution is linear, the other one is quadratic.

In Europe? Because it&#x27;s slower and more expensive than budget airlines.

&gt; Serving peripheral population centers in California is a nice thing to do<p>So you want to build a train network that costs hundred(s) of billions but skip adding a couple stations for millions of people the track is passing by? Sounds like a poor idea.

This is a very good article. It&#x27;s interesting to see why HSR costs so much.<p>For those TLDR. HSR fails cost&#x2F;benefit analysis.<p>The paragraph is very good :<p>&quot;By CA HSR’s own numbers, the completed system may carry 35 million passengers per year by 2040, or 100,000 per day. This capacity could also be served by a fleet of just 40 737s (less than current LAX-SFO traffic), of which Boeing makes more than 500 per year. Bought new, this fleet would cost $3.6b, and with a lead time of, at most, a few months. Upgrades to Modesto and Bakersfield airport terminals could service the 737 for mere $10s of millions. The fleet would cost about $2.9b to operate each year, which under current airline business models can be served by fares of about $60 each way. If we operate this airline for free (no tickets!) for 40 years, the total operating costs climb to $120b, which is equivalent to CA HSR’s currently wildly unrealistic estimated construction costs.&quot;<p>Rail is great, for freight.

I don’t understand the point of high speed rail. You can just show up for a domestic flight 30 mins before and you get to your destination 4x faster. The only good thing about trains are the views.