Disclaimer, I am American but have traveled to places with HSR and well rounded public transit options like Japan.
I also live in the Northeast, where we have the closest thing to HSR. I personally think if we leverage it a little more and focus on it in a region to region basis, we’d have a lot more options for day trips and spur economic activity.
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Its great if you are traveling from urban center to urban center. I like it in those cases.
However, its usually cheaper to travel by car (especially for groups) and for every trip I take to a major metropolitan area, I go on 4 or 5 to a wilderness location. High speed rail wouldn’t help with that which means I would still want to own a personal automobile.
I loved high-speed rail when I was in Asia. It was generally faster and less hassle than flights due to the faster security and boarding process, and stations were closer to the city center and better connected by other public transport than airports.
However, the US just doesn’t have the population density in most of the country to support it or the costs of building it, plus the property rights, eminent domain issues, and NIMBYism the US would have to deal with.
I think it would be great to improve existing lines to handle high-speed rail on the coasts, but it wouldn’t be cost efficient for most of the country given the likely ridership levels.
for the record, the Acela is technically HSR. Barely, but it is.
But generally, big fan. There are some good projects happening; CAHSR, Brightline West, and the Northeast Maglev are all really good, and if Texas Central survives it will also be.
That said, I also think some of the higher-speed programs are good, like the Lincoln Service 110mph upgrades, the original Brightline in Florida, the S-Line between Raleigh and Richmond, or the proposed Scranton-NYC route. These are distances that while they would be obviously faster as true HSR, can still be great options at lower speeds and costs; all of those segments are short enough to be a PITA to fly (and awful for the environment), and at 110mph faster by rail than by car, without having to do a megaproject for true HSR. I think there’s a lot of room for that, too.
A lot of people think HSR is the end-all be-all answer when it comes to public transportation. I think it could be quite useful in many circumstances, especially in the east where the population is more dense, but there are a lot of hurdles with establishing it that nobody ever talks about. California has been trying to build one for years and it’s become a quagmire for them. If it ever finishes, it’s never going to be as fast as they promised.
Sounds like a great idea but how do you use it on infrastructure shared with trains dedicated to local service?
HSR is a great concept but the cities (not just the big ones either) it connects would need to vastly improve their intercity public transport network to make it worthwhile. Because what’s the point of taking a high speed train to Dallas, for example, if I’m going to have to Uber everywhere?
I also don’t think it will ever get popular enough for us to see much benefit. Outside of the northeast, our cities were designed around the car. There’s ample parking everywhere, streets are more car friendly, and you can just get around a lot easier by car.
Outside of a few select areas in the US, I just don’t think it will be beneficial.
If we’re talking passenger rail, whose intention is to connect regions and the country as a whole, I think we need to crawl, walk, then run.
Most of the country doesn’t have **frequent** and **reliable** passenger rail. We need to nail those two first. Like I know people would take a train from Indianapolis to Chicago even if it took a bit longer vs driving if only to avoid Chicago traffic. But right now it only comes 3x a week at 5am at a station that is basically a homeless shelter.
I need to get to Chicago later this year to board an Amtrak to Seattle. But I’m not using Amtrak from Indianapolis. Instead I’m taking a bus. It’ll be faster, cleaner, safer, and it’ll basically take me right to Union Station.
Speaking of which, just in general about public transit and not specifically about passenger. Most people are not going to choose to use public transit if it is dirty, criminal activity is just tolerated, or people don’t feel safe. I don’t mean like “ew, a poor person, gross” type of elitism. I mean open drug use, people masturbating at the terminals, pockets getting picked. To Amtrak’s credit they don’t allow bullshit on their trains but some of the stations are not places you want to be at for long hours. Often at odd hours of the day, and if your train gets delayed you could be there a long time.
But like, this isn’t a problem in so many other countries. I’ve used public transit (buses, local rail, regional rail) in Spain, France, and Italy and not once did I see someone smoking crack or even just being an asshole and playing loud music over their phone.
I love public transit and I take it when I can. I’m even booked on an Amtrak trip later this year. But this country just makes it so hard to use ground transit to get across the country. And so its hard to choose it if you have the financial means to drive or fly, so then those on the bus or the Amtrak are those that have to be. Thus the poor service.
I would very much like some.
When I was a kid growing up in rural Missouri, the trains in West Germany were used as the example for passenger rail. West Germany was about the same square miles as Missouri. West Germany had 61,000,000 people. Missouri had 4,700,000. You didn’t need to be a genius to know we were never going to have German quality passenger rail.
High speed rail has limited use cases and major property rights and NIBMY issues. I can see it gaining traction in the Northeast and maybe Texas, but otherwise developing sustainable air travel is the best way to go for a country as low density as ours
Having more trains going between metropolitan centers would be fine, but it would be prohibitively expensive to build out HSR across the country. You’d spend a trillion dollars on eminent domain before you ever dug a shovel of dirt.
Dosent do anything for me personally. And due to the highly politicized nature of HSR on the west coast it’s going to be a target for a long time.
Love it. Have used it in Germany, France, and China. New York to Chicago could be reached in like 4 hours.
It’s like those 300k sports cars. Very nice, but the Toyota is doing just fine.
I think it would be great for specific urban areas (especially the NE Corridor), but that our focus with rail should probably be more encouraging more regional rail where it makes sense.
Honestly, there are intermediary steps we could take to make normal rail service accessible and useful to more people, before going to the expense of high speed rail.
Just doing regular track upgrades would let the trains we have go closer to their actual top speed for one thing, and giving track priority to passenger trains rather than freight would make service more reliable in more corridors.
I think it’s only as useful as the transit in the destination city. Japan and South Korea, everything is built around train stations. A lot of Europe is pretty doable, some places I still prefer a car or its still more viable to fly. The US, linking up the east coast would be great for HSR…NYC, Boston, Philly, Baltimore, etc.
Out west, I’m kind of skeptical. I’d rather resources be focused on improving our cities’ local transit systems, because it otherwise feels like a gimmick if I need to drive to get to the station.
In some places it makes too much sense.
For example, in Texas we have Austin, Dallas, and Houston in a Triangle all about 3.5 hours from each other by car, but high speed rail could cut that in half making a quick trip to either a practicality. Would make a ton of sense for travel connections or even for commuting or business.
In other places though not so much. It’s expensive and takes a lot of effort
As a Texan, I’m in favor of the “Texas triangle” high speed rail that would connect Houston, Dallas/FTW, (Austin) and San Antonio. Some 80-90% of Texas lives in/near the triangle and this would significantly speed up inter-city travel.
I think the biggest challenge with HSR is that it’s by necessity an urban center to urban center mode of transit. However, a good portion of journeys don’t work this way. Why would people take a mode of transportation where you have to drive into the city, ride a train for a couple of hours, then rent a car and drive out of the city because your actual destination is out in the ‘burbs and is inaccessible by public transit? We need better (cleaner, safer, faster, more convenient) transit *within* cities/metro areas to address that problem before HSR – or even regular intercity rail – becomes truly practical.
That said, I think it could work geographically. It’s probably most competitive in the 4-8 hours (driving time) category – shorter and it makes more sense to drive, longer and it makes more sense to fly – but there’s a lot of regions within the US with cities about that far apart. Look at the Northeast and Midwest for example.
EDIT: This also says nothing about the political challenge of building something like this. It would be a megaproject on the scale of the interstate system, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and take decades to build.
Enabling the US to at least try to do this is why PERMITTING REFORM needs, like, Leo DiCaprio or Justin Timberlake to come make it sexy.
I wish we had a hell of a lot more of it.
It’s fast
I would like to have it
I’d love it
I LOVE high speed rail, but it has some serious drawbacks in the US.
#1 being, its useless unless it connects cities that have local rail networks.
Whats the point in taking HSR from Houston to Austin if you need to rent a car as soon as you step off the train? Just drive or fly.
That being said, Why don’t we have local rail networks? (I can lecture for hours on this.)
Here is the bottom line, our car-centric culture started in the 1920s, and it took close to a century for us to start undoing it. I don’t really think we have made serious efforts until 2000-2010.
I think its going to take at least that long to un-do the mess we made for ourselves.
I support federal transportation investment, and incremental change. If there are corridors where HSR could work (Seattle-Portland, Chicago -St Louis) I support gradually building them. But we have a LONG way to go.
I’d love a faster train between me and Portland or San Francisco, but I doubt it would get enough ridership to justify the cost. The thing the US has that most countries with good transit don’t, is a very spread out population. We just don’t have the density of Japan or the EU.