You May Also Like
When you guys travel, both domestically and internationally, what do you say when people ask where in the US you’re from?
- May 8, 2023
- 46 comments
When you guys travel, both domestically and internationally, what do you say when people ask where in the…
You’re the president and want to throw a party at the Whitehouse. What would you do?
- December 15, 2023
- No comments
You’re the president and want to throw a party at the Whitehouse. What would you do?
37 comments
Most Americans have cars. They go wherever the driver wants them to go.
America big. Passenger trains don’t really make sense outside of a few corridors.
Oh boy, this question. In short, the vast majority of the US does not have the required population density to make high-speed rail workable.
HSR must be grade separated from other vehicles, meaning an entire separate line is required. Also, HSR must have limited turns, and any turns that are necessary must be extremely gradual. This makes construction very expensive, and land usage is high. In a country with low population density, and robust private property law (ie using eminent domain is hard) like the US, most HSR projects are considered DOA.
That said some projects are in the works, especially east of the Mississippi.
Several reasons:
– America is large. Once you get away from the north east coast, large cities get further and further apart, and would be the only logical destinations to link rails between. Our population density is really unequally distributed.
– we already have an economic and rather quick way of transporting ourselves thousands of miles within our border: cars and planes. Economic is a relative term person to person, but I think the point stands for the most part. America has a vast highway and state road network system that works and works well.
– Our railways are standardized for freight, not passengers
– cost to build: the infrastructure for stations, trains, rails. The purchase of the land for hubs and where the rails lay on. The staffing costs. Again, we already have an economic solution to traveling across the US. Plus, we have pretty strong land ownership laws that would mean building these lines would be a clusterfuck, even if the government could seize all the land it needed.
– Our cities definitely need better public transport within them, but none of them are so insurmountably large that we would need a bullet train within them. So if it’s not economically feasible or needed to link two or three or more cities together, and it’s unecessary to build an intra-city one- why would we?
– We do have an effort to connect parts of california with the pacific northwest IIRC. I also believe there has been discussion (maybe even proposals? I feel like I heard about bids being sought) about linking LA and Vegas. The only place I could see bullet trains being feasible would be connecting something like Seattle/San Francisco/LA on the west coast and, like, Maybe NY to DC? But the east coast is pretty well connected already with regular trains, highways, etc. I would actually like the west coast to be connected via bullet train but funding will be the biggest issue there.
– There is no way to fully understand American car culture as someone not born and raised here who has owned and driven a car. It is one of our ultimate feelings of independence starting as a teenager. Car culture dominates.
From what I understand, HSR is only worth the investment on the regional level with a certain degree of population density being met. The only region that could properly utilize such technology in the US would be the northeast however that runs into the problem of property acquisition in that land here is probably the most expensive on average in the country.
The property can still be acquired however the amount of pushback and hostility Local and potentially state governments would display over this would be unreal. Here in Boston we can’t even get high density apartments buildings constructed over local backlash, this kind of project will be like 100x worse
Most European countries can fit into one state.
I believe the bullet train in France is 660 miles.
Building a transcontinental bullet train would be impractical. Beyond costly, huge amount of land usage and provide little service to vast areas of the country.
does it have other transportation priorities
Yes. Cars and planes.
does it just not care?
Mostly also yes, because it’s not the priority.
HSR is ridiculously expensive to implement and we have functioning ways to get around the country already. It’s just not something that’s a priority for most people because it doesn’t solve enough problems to justify the investment to most.
A lot of people seem to not realize that the reason countries can have proper, valuable HSR is due to high population density. Countries such as Japan, France, Germany, and Austria are all densely populated and their HSR systems are built between their densest regions.
In contrast, a majority of the US is virtually devoid of people and would be wholly unsuitable to build HSR for much of the country.
That said, HSR is feasible in select areas. The best regions for HSR are the Northeast (which does have limited HSR), the West Coast, Florida, Texas, the Midwest and the Front Range. Of these, California is attempting HSR (and failing because bureaucracy is big slowdown of everything), as well as plans for the same in Florida and Texas.
Once these corridors have HSR, it will likely be all that would be built. Intercontinental HSR will never be a reality due to the cheap and ease of domestic air travel; though if a hypothetical Midwest system is extensive enough, it likely will connect to the Northeast system though Philadelphia.
I’m going to disagree with most of the answers here. It’s not about population density — the US has lots of urban centers that could be well-served by high-speed rail. Sure, maybe not NYC to LA, but there’s no reason routes like San Francisco to LA, Houston to Dallas, Richmond-Raleigh-Charlotte-Atlanta, Boston-NYC-Philly-DC-Richmond, Atlanta-Jacksonville-Orlando-Tampa-Miami, just as a few examples, couldn’t work as HSR routes.
The problem is multifaceted. One aspect of it is that Amtrak doesn’t own any rail outside of the Northeast Corridor (the NEC is Boston->DC basically), and is at the mercy of the freight companies. Since HSR has to be grade-separated from normal train traffic and from road traffic, building HSR in the US means you have to build from scratch, including land acquisition — you can’t just upgrade existing lines, because they belong to the freight companies. This is extremely expensive and difficult. Both the California SF-LA HSR project and the Texas Houston-Dallas Shinkansen project are struggling with land acquisition.
Additionally, there are a bunch of reasons that make infrastructure projects in the US generally difficult and expensive compared to other countries. Part of it is that US permitting and environmental review processes often lend themselves to NIMBYism, so even though we have similar amounts of NIMBYs to peer countries, they have more political power.
Here are a couple of resources talking about rail and infrastructure projects in the US. Particularly the Ezra Klein episode is really good. The last article also focuses on NYC and the MTA, but illustrates some of the hurdles that other places in the US face as well.
https://youtube.com/v/p__teJLmY3k
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jerusalem-demsas.html
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york-infrastructure-costs.html
It’s a big country, we generally fly, it’s faster.
We have such a car heavy culture that it almost makes no sense to have HSR. When we need to travel far we drive to the airport and take a flight
I believe Texas Central Railway is trying to build a bullet train line between Dallas and Houston but have a legal issues regarding land.
Why is the rest of the world so far behind in terms of efficient freight rail networks?
The US is optimized to move freight via rail.
We move far more freight than people, by weight, every day.
It requires far less energy to move freight by rail than by truck.
It generates less carbon dioxide to move freight by rail than by truck.
If we were to switch to preferring rail for passengers, it would increase energy usage, costs and would be worse for the environment.
Gas is a lot cheaper here than in Europe. But also Americans honestly just like cars. Cars are seen as freedom and individualism. There isn’t strong public or political will to develop trains.
There’s a lot of issues.
* Country is more spread out so building fast rail will cost more with less potential income
* People have cars and are accustomed to driving long distances
* The biggest reason IMO is that our whole philosophy in rail is different. We have completely dedicated ourselves to freight rail. We in fact have the best freight train system in the world. It just has always come at the cost of a passenger rail system.
A slightly different angle from most other commenters…
The existing rail system is privately owned by the freight companies (C&S, Norfolk Southern, etc). They have government agreements signed way back before most states existed, and they hold onto them, because it gives them total control of their own property… even the federal government has to ask permission and follow their rules when around their tracks.
Amtrak (the passenger train system) has an agreement to operate on their rail lines. A bullet train, with the speeds they operate at, would probably“hog” the connection, or they’d never be able to operate at full speed because of needing to work around freight trains also operating on that line. That’s aside from whether the existing rails even meet specs for a bullet train. So it’s very possible that any bullet train developer would need to build their own rail system, cross country, because the freight companies would not want to de-prioritize their own use of their own rails.
Then, also, we have a huge airline industry that has taken up the slack where rail transport between major metro areas was never developed. Any investment in rail is going to hurt their pockets, so there would be huge investment in lobbying against that.
We decided to spec into cars and freeways instead because it’s more profitable for oil compani- I mean, it’s more freedom for our people. It’s freedom. There’s freedom.
The better question is: why is Europe and Asia so backwards when it comes to rail freight?
We aren’t behind. We simply chose a different path.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan, and used the bullet trains, local trains, taxis and walking. Never needed to drive. That COULD work in the US in some limited areas. But we aren’t set up that way. We chose a different layout.
Besides, the US has, hands down, the best, most efficient rail system in the world. Google it. The US is the most efficient at moving goods around via rail.
So why are other countries so terrible at rail freight?
[Europe backwards](https://www-freightwaves-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-europe-so-absurdly-backward-compared-to-the-u-s-in-rail-freight-transport/amp?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16505410430651&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.freightwaves.com%2Fnews%2Fwhy-is-europe-so-absurdly-backward-compared-to-the-u-s-in-rail-freight-transport)
[uS rail ](https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr090820-us-rail-envy-of-the-world.htm)
[Europe study](https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s12544-013-0090-4)
[us most advanced rail system in the world](https://www.masterresource.org/railroads/us-most-advanced-rail-world/)
I have cars. They are faster and more convenient than trains.
Even the bullet train that was planned in California had so many stops it was going to be slower than just driving.
Because most of us do not take trains to begin with?
They removed a lot of old stations.
It makes sense in smaller geographical regions in which a plane would not make sense.
In the U. S. it is so vast that a plane makes more sense than a super speed train.
If people take a train here it’s when they have time to get where they are going. If they are in a rush they take a plane.
Imagine laying all that track and then it still would not go most places?
Only the biggest cities would be covered, and then many people would still have to continue traveling some other way.
It is also very expensive to do that, over such a vast map.
BTW the question is phrased a bit insultingly.
Well that’s because high speed rail really only works in densely populated corridors such as the Northeastern United States where you can take a train, some of it being high speed, from Washington D.C. to all the way past Portland, Maine. Truth be told the Northeastern US is really the only place in the US where something of a passenger train system resembling the European one exists. This is due to the fact that Northeastern states are much smaller and have population densities similar to a lot of Western and Central Europe.
The only other places that high speed rail could take root in the US is around parts of Florida, California, maybe between Seattle and Portland, and one around the Great Lakes. Even then, I don’t think these hypothetical high speed rail lines would be as successful as the one in the Northeast.
Because the overwhelming majority of our rails are devoted to freight shipping.
high speed rail is not practical over the long distances involved. TGV trains also require long, straight stretches and cannot be built in rugged terrain.
America is a very large and spread apart country. Large population centers tend to me several miles apart. For instance, England has a population density 7.5 times higher than the US
Countries with HSR also tend to have robust public transit systems that ferry you around once you reach your destination city. Most of our cities don’t. For HSR to really be useful, we would need to ALSO upgrade these local transit systems. That, plus the scale of the US and the many, many miles of track we would have to lay and maintain, gives you sense of what a vast undertaking it would be.
Plus, we are already very invested in our interstate highway system and airports. Adding a third option for long-distance travel…if was successful, it would siphon use, and therefore government funding, from roads and airports, resulting in quality degradation in those. Or, more likely, it would not be popular enough to justify its cost, and become a big disgraceful money pit.
In short, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner – we’re deeply invested in infrastructure for air and road, which are becoming more expensive as oil prices rise, and are not as clean. But that’s where we find ourselves.
We use trains for freight rather then people. People take planes to travel long distances.
High speed rail might make sense connecting cities where it would reduce travel vs. car and be more efficient than flying… say LA-San Francisco or Chicago-St. Louis.
But most of the rail infrastructure is owned by freight railroads. They lease/share tracks with passenger rail, but the freight trains get priority. That makes it difficult to implement high speed trains due to traffic, priority of track use, speed of other trains on tracks, etc.
To build high speed rail, it would likely mean gaining new rights of way and running new tracks, which of course means lots of cost for land/rights and the almost certain legal battles to get all the necessary land, as well as building costs for new tracks connecting cities.
I feel like this might as well be in the FAQ’s at this point.
Outside of a few select cities (mostly in the northeast corridor), HSR would not make sense. We have much better alternatives (flying) that get you there quicker and often cheaper, so spending vital infrastructure money on a transportation system a lot of people won’t use is just throwing away money.
It wouldn’t help me one.. I don’t live in town.
It has other priorities.
We are not “competing” so of course we are not going to be winning. Trains fit in other countries’ geographies better than ours.
We either drive or fly
I don’t know a community that is obsessed with trains a much as Reddit. Cars are better at short distance travel, and planes are better at long distance travel.
I don’t know a community that is obsessed with trains a much as Reddit. Cars are better at short distance travel, and planes are better at long distance travel.
There’s a lot of private property rights here that make building large infrastructure projects nowadays very expensive.
Not rail related, but just to demonstrate.
There’s been a pretty big movement to transfer abandoned rail lines into multi-use trails. But locally, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that abandoned raillines don’t automatically keep their right of way adjacent to the abandoned rail line. What that means is that if a local government wants to build or expand a trail, they need to negotiate with private property owners on small fractions of their land, many of which they didn’t even know they owned this property to begin with.
Indianapolis is extending their Monon Trail up to two feet on both sides, and its looking at a few million dollars in acquisitions just to purchase the right-of-way rights from adjacent property owners.
And that’s for a trail that really only needs pavement and doesn’t necessarily need underground utilities and whatnot.
Why build new infrastructure if what exists for more commonly-used forms of transportation is barely able to function? We desperately need to work on rehabbing roads, bridges and tunnels first. Trains just don’t get enough use for us to worry about building new rail systems.