Obviously a choice, but also at 200mph it's obviously a vastly slower experience in a lot of way for many of the most-trafficked US domestic routes.
Even at 300mph, which IIRC is much faster than normal operations on existing system, transcontinental travel becomes "too slow." The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example.
Effectively would split the continent in a way that it hasn't been for generations. Rountes like NYC<->Chicago would get annoyingly slower, but long routes like DC<->Seattle would become an "almost never" trip by train @ 200mph (even assuming direct, as-the-crow-flies). Practically, you're talking "east coast to Asia" durations to cross the continent. Non-starter.
Disclaimer: I love trains. I want high speed trains deployed widely in the US.
First, 300 mph (480 kmh) is not on the cards. It's feasible technically but the energy usage rises exponentially, so it's quickly less attractive. (Obviously planes are even more inefficient for exactly the same reason, but wind resistance is at least reduced at altitude.) This is why speeds tend to top out at around 300 kmh, with only a very few prestige services (in China mainly) going marginally faster.
The good news is that 300 kmh is really fast, and rail is usually much more time-efficient at the endpoints (i.e. stations are more central and there's less waiting). In China, Shanghai-Beijing (approximately LA to San Francisco) is now possible in 4h30. Given the endpoint advantage, that is more than competitive with plane travel, and much more pleasant.
As of this year, China also has a high-speed capsule sleeper that gets you from Beijing to Guangzhou (CORRECTION: 1875 km) in 12 hours at an average speed of 180 kmh. It's still night travel, not every American would be interested. But it shows what's possible.
> Beijing to Guangzhou (same as NY to LA!) in 12 hours at an average speed of 180 kmh
I don't understand. It looks like the Chinese route is ~1200 miles and the US route is about 2500 miles. At the same 180kmh, wouldn't that imply a full 24 hours on a train?
re: LA-SF, I do think HSR could make a big dent on each side of the continent. But the reality is Americans are accustomed to crossing the entire continent quickly, and HSR is not yet a substitute for that.
You're right, it's nothing like LA-NYC - corrected.
(Tangential - the source of my faulty research was Claude Haiku 4.5, which I will quote verbatim: "Two major US cities separated by approximately 2230 km are New York City, New York and Los Angeles, California." I know that figure is too low but believed it anyway. I've just asked for better figures and it's completely unable to answer accurately. Well well.)
The other figures were from memory and pretty correct.
> The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example.
It already takes 6 hours to fly. Add in security, checked bags, getting to and from the airport and it's close to 10 hours. Also you waste a day or ruin a night's sleep on the redeye.
Compared to that an overnight train with a bed sounds delightful. People could do almost-day-trips, coast-to-coast, with no ill effects. Leave LA tonight, shop/sightsee/eat all day in NYC, take in a show, hop on the late train back to LA the following day. This is pretty near impossible today unless you have a private jet.
> It already takes 6 hours to fly. Add in security, checked bags, getting to and from the airport and it's close to 10 hours.
10 hours is still significantly faster than a hypothetical HSR. Remember that it would also have to stop along the way. Secon, not everyone lives/is traveling to a place that is near a hypothetical train station; you have to keep in mind that American cities tend toward sprawl. HSR leaving from e.g. downtown LA would still be less convenient for e.g. the folks who live in the Valley. It's definitely not a 10-hour excursion for many people to transit the country (source: I did this for years for work).
> Also you waste a day or ruin a night's sleep on the redeye.
Highly dependent on the individual & service class. But the point of this is you're actually physically there in less time.
> Leave LA tonight, shop/sightsee/eat all day in NYC, take in a show, hop on the late train back to LA the following day. This is pretty near impossible today unless you have a private jet.
You're going to get a lot of pushback from people who have been to weddings on the other side of the continent, since they will have done this. Most of them do not have private jets, it's just a common thing Americans do.
> Remember that it would also have to stop along the way
Why?
> Highly dependent on the individual & service class.
There are flights that offer lie-flat seats for most of the passengers on board? I have to confess I haven't ever seen any domestic flights in North America that have lie-flat seats. But maybe I'm just poor.
> But the point of this is you're actually physically there in less time.
And more tired when you get there. I'd rather sleep during my travel and enjoy the destination than waste time recovering in my hotel room. The alternative is to waste your day flying out so you don't lose sleep.
> Most of them do not have private jets, it's just a common thing Americans do.
I'm sure there are individuals who do the redeye consecutive nights. I'm pointing out that doing it instead on a train, sleeping in a bed, will leave you way more well-rested. You might fly out Friday night and return Sunday morning. But you're going to need all of Sunday to recover from those flights.
A large advantage of the train is all the places on the way. I don't actually want to get from New York to Los Angeles. However, I live in the middle of the country between the two cities and by stopping near me, I could get on that train and I could travel, probably not to either New York or LA, but to some other city also in the middle of the country.
Night trains sound like a good thing, but in reality they're not. They work well only in the cases where a city is just far enough that it's an overnight trip, but not much more. Which is to say you get on the train, you brush your teeth, you go to sleep, you wake up in the morning, and you have just enough time to get practice before you get off the train. If your train instead arrives at 4 a.m., that's way too early and so you're gonna be sleeping on the train or they're gonna have to wake you up early in the morning. The other one is particularly a great option. The other way is even worse though if you're on the train go to sleep and you get wake up in the morning and there's still several more hours to do while you're sitting on a train doing basically nothing - except thinking the whole time, you know what? I could have just flown. This would have been an hour to the airport, another hour in line, three hours of flight, and they'd be there. And then they could sleep in a hotel, the cheapest economy hotel room is still much larger than the best luxury train sleeper car.
Because (ignoring the middle of the continent for a moment) "LA" is actually a very large area where having a single stop erases many of the advantages cited for trains. LA does not really have the sort of city center of most train-centric cities, and LA has poor public transit. On the other end, "NYC" has the same property, mostly because you would want to include people from other parts of the densely-populated region around NYC and not just make everyone schlep into Manhattan.
The Shanghai<->Beijing HSR has 24 stops over 819 miles, for example. Similarly, it would only make sense for a US HSR to stop in e.g. Dallas or Chicago or other cities in between.
> I'd rather sleep during my travel and enjoy the destination than waste time recovering in my hotel room. The alternative is to waste your day flying out so you don't lose sleep.
Yeah, like I said individual preference. I don't normally want to do back-to-back redeye flights, but I have done it and am glad it was an option.
If we're talking about a replacement or alternative for flying between NY and LA, a non-stop train makes perfect sense. Planes don't stop. A high-speed train can carry more passengers than a 737.
This would make sense if the US only had two major coastal cities, but that's not the case.
From another of my comments:
A realistic HSR network in the US will also involve changing trains in the midwest because there are too many pairs of big cities involved. Miami<->SF, Atlanta<->LA, DC<->SF, Philadelphia<->Phoenix, etc.
You still need all those things for a high speed train. The only reason it’s a little less today is that almost nobody takes passenger rail.
Keep in mind these old downtown stations built in 1900 won’t be able to handle the kind of passenger counts that would “need” to be shifted from the airports, so don’t delude yourself into thinking you wouldn’t need big train stations built in the outskirts, crowded and irritating to get to, like we have with modern airports.
Your day trip thing sounds even more confusing. That itinerary that’s “near impossible” with fast flight becomes more impossible with trains that take 2-3x longer. Also, sleeper train tickets are incredibly expensive compared to coach, because of how much space they take up and the cost of upkeep for these little suites. They’re always going to be expensive, like the redeye flight on a lie-flat bed. So again, no different than what we have today, just much, much slower and less accessible to the masses.
But your high-speed train enables a lot of things that are not really feasible to do on an airplane. speed train enables a lot of things that are not really feasible to do on an airplane. You should be thinking about a train for things where I could drive my own car but it'd be a little bit annoying to spend an hour on the road.
I happened to be in Des Moines a few years ago and waiting for my airplane an announcement came on that the plane to Chicago was delayed. And I overheard someone near me say, why would you fly to Chicago? You can just drive. Realistically, if Chicago is your destination from Des Moines, depending on where you go, it is quite possible that you can drive your car and get there faster than flying. However, a high-speed train could likely get you there faster than the airplane. Chicago was of course a large city. There's a very big difference between I want to go into the loop versus my destination is an outer suburb. I would expect your high speed train makes two or even three stops in the city of Chicago plus, some stops in other cities that happen to be along the way.
Exactly all of this. HSR in the US makes a lot more sense if you look at it as a regional phenomenon. Atlanta<->Miami, DC<->NYC, NYC<->Chicago, Houston<->Dallas, Chicago<->Nashville. Those all fit the prescription of being around the same time as driving.
Miami<->Seattle is not going to fit neatly in HSR. The distance is too great. A realistic HSR network in the US will also involve changing trains in the midwest because there are too many pairs of big cities involved. Miami<->SF, Atlanta<->LA, DC<->SF, Philadelphia<->Phoenix, etc.
The other hindrance for HSR in the US is our family sizes. "It's about the same time to drive" is a solid argument for 1 traveler, it's less so for 4 travelers with 4 HSR tickets. Many people will keep driving shorter distances for this reason alone.
I have regularly taken two-day trips in the US because the cost of an airplane for 5 is much more than the cost of my car even including hotel rooms. Lately I've been taking Amtrak, which is a little bit cheaper, but it's still annoying enough that I would only do it because I hate driving.
It also helps the economics to realize that there are very few places in the US that anyone would go that not having a personal car is a reasonable thing and so you have to have the cost of a rental car to anything other than grabbing your own.
Tbh - once you somehow figure out who's going to pay for the massive amount of construction, and the land (I know the strips of farmland MIGHT be cheap but the last few dozen miles near each place everbody wants to go get very tricky) - I agree that these sub-400-mile trips are 1000x more competitive with flying, compared to the transcontinental ones. Yeah, I'd love to hop a HSR from Dallas to Houston, or Atlanta to Jacksonvile.
I just think a transcontinental HSR would not be a popular enough trip that we can responsibly include transcontinental passenger traffic in economic considerations to justify the build. In other words, if we can only afford the build in general if we can get like 60% of NY-LA, NY-SF, etc. traffic to switch to trains, then it's going to go bankrupt.
> That itinerary that’s “near impossible” with fast flight becomes more impossible with trains that take 2-3x longer.
No because you can actually sleep on the train and be well-rested. Even non sleeper seats are wider and can recline better on a train.
On planes your sleeping neighbor drools on your shoulder and your seat reclines 5 degrees if you're lucky. Sure technically you could take a redeye two nights in a row. If you don't mind being a zombie for the next 2 days.
You're comparing the most expensive train ticket, a sleeper car, with coach? That's insane. Sleeper car tickets are priced like the lie-flat plane seats. I experienced United's lie-flat premium transcontinental service almost a decade ago and it was a blissful night's sleep. Airlines have only improved the product since.
Compare a coach flight with the neighbor and the 5º reclined seat with coach train tickets with nearly the same setup. Maybe an extra inch of width.
What’s creepy is how little the people arguing for this kind of thing seem to care that the policy would be hated by a majority, and experienced as cruel oppression. They just say “this is the right thing to do.” Climate/degrowth people seem to be the most anti-democratic politically. It seems they NEED to install a monarchy to get their way, because any system of government that allows the people to have any say will never accept the massive sacrifices that they religiously believe are necessary.
Is ~400 million to ~4 billions excess deaths over the next ~50 years worth it? How many excess deaths is it worth? Everything is about trade offs. How much mortgaging of the future with are we comfortable with for today’s luxuries? Because this is a debt that will need to be paid back, potentially by someone not even yet born, through no fault of their own.
At least the future can default on sovereign debt, it cannot default on the energy and resources required to repair physical systems required for survival, that debt is the ultimate recourse debt. There is nowhere to run from it.
I hear what you're saying, but it is also true that re-splitting the population would probably be more difficult politically than e.g. switching off all the fossil fuel generation plants east of the Mississippi or gently transitioning the US fleet to all-EV. As you said, everything is tradeoffs.
Which sucks, because I really would go for a US high-speed rail network.
Even at 300mph, which IIRC is much faster than normal operations on existing system, transcontinental travel becomes "too slow." The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example.
Effectively would split the continent in a way that it hasn't been for generations. Rountes like NYC<->Chicago would get annoyingly slower, but long routes like DC<->Seattle would become an "almost never" trip by train @ 200mph (even assuming direct, as-the-crow-flies). Practically, you're talking "east coast to Asia" durations to cross the continent. Non-starter.
Disclaimer: I love trains. I want high speed trains deployed widely in the US.