It depends on what you use and what standard of HSR you believe in. True HSR like Japan or China? Absolutely, it’ll cause significant damage. But you’re looking at diesel powered 110-125mph (Amtrak in the Midwest, for example), it’ll still be relatively minor as that equipment is more in line with freight strength standards vs lightweight passenger stuff.
I hate to tell you this, but Bison can and do climb moderate to steep slopes, especially in the Wyoming/Colorado areas. The often climb onto graded roadways with no regard for traffic, so good luck keeping them off the tracks
I don't think you understand, the great plains stretch longer than the length of your entire country. All with bison roaming. Building thousands of miles of viaducts is ridiculously fucking expensive and it all needs to be checked for any damage annually.
I’m not sure that is true if you look at a population density map everyone lives in the east and the west of China is empty. I assume the high speed rail infrastructure is entirely in the east. Unlike in the U.S. where the east and west extremes are highly populated and the center is empty, which makes rail travel between the two extremes much more impractical than if we all lived in the east and the entire west was unpopulated. Interesting to note, when that was the case the U.S. had the best rail network in the world.
Our “modern infrastructure” is for freight rail, interstate construction and maintenance and air travel. We just don’t focus the same portion on rail because transnational rail travel is impractical unless you’re bulk raw materials or heavy industrial goods.
The U.S. moved 2.16 trillion tonne kilometer of freight on rail alone in 2023. The UK moved a total of 167 billion tonne-kilometer in 2023 on all forms of transit. Are there parts that need constant updates and improvements? Sure. Is our infrastructure so bad that we cant move significantly more freight over significantly more vast distances on a regular basis? No. To call it worn out is demonstrably not true.
Large parts of high speed rail have to be to avoid gradients anyway. They can't just follow the lay of the land as they are much more sensitive to gradient changes.
It's not just China, if you look at Japan too. A lot of it is on viaducts.
Do you know how much of the US Great Plains is wild land used by animals to roam?
how much does an adult panda weigh?
how much does an adult bison weigh?
do pandas congregate in herds? It’s not one 2500lb bison a train needs to plow through - a bison herd can be 1000 animals. Not all would be on the track at once but I don’t like those odds. They also move at their own pace and won’t leave if you try to scare them away as not much intimidates them. When they do move they can run at 40mph and jump six feet, so good luck with your grade separation on what is otherwise completely flat land.
Pandas are an endangered species. It was an extreme comparison because of the ridiculous excuse that Bison are the main reason that you can't have high speed rail. Not the fact that you don't want to pay for it or that it's inconvenient to sit on a train for slightly longer than a flight.
Also the fact that you assume that high speed rail can only be used east-west. Because it's harder to come up with silly excuses when you apply it to the coasts.
E.g. California's high speed rail has been fucked over countless times including by Elon who has admitted he only came up with hyperloop to stop California investing in high speed rail.
Your first comment is about Bison. Which was unrelated to the OC.
I assumed you were speaking about cross country routes hence why you brought up Bison. Otherwise it's just irrelevant based on their geographical distribution
Tbf, we're overlooking the most american part: there's gonna be a guy with either a shotgun or a rifle hanging out the window, always ready to clear the tracks. XD
Not high speed, but still railways. While now there are greater numbers of bison, that’s because of conservation efforts from the 20th century cause in the late 1800s there were less than 1000 bison left in America
To be honest when I see most people talk about high speed trains in the US most mean like east coast connection or some other area with multiple mayor cities. I don’t really know how many high speed lines the US have in those areas though.
Even within those corridors, I doubt it would be all that popular, certainly not enough to justify the expense.
Take, I dunno, Florida. You build a high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando. Okay, great. Why would I ever take it if I already own a car? I can drive between those two cities using already-existing freeways in not that much less time and you'll probably want a car to get around both of those cities anyway.
You build a high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando.
Just took that exact drive a few days ago and I gotta say, I would have rather taken a train than sit in that God awful traffic.
When you get within like 10 miles of Orlando between 5 and 10 pm, you get major delays because of all the people leaving Disney/going there to stay at the resort. I mean there is literally a single highway connecting Tampa to Orlando so that thing gets clogged pretty quick.
And herein lies the grand problem... Train rails in itself is an incomplete solution.
You need the supporting city transport options. You need bus and tram networks, and metros.
Have those in place, and suddenly you go from
"why would I go there when I need a car anyway" to "why would I bother with the hassle of needing to focus the entire trip, and then still having to find a parking spot, and pay for it."
"why would I go there when I need a car anyway" to "why would I bother with the hassle of needing to focus the entire trip, and then still having to find a parking spot, and pay for it."
Nah, there'd still be quite a place for cars even with those - the way U.S. cities are laid out in a lot of cases pretty much guarantees it, even disregarding the many people who don't live in the city.
I am entirely on-board with there being more options, though. Upgrades to the bus system would be excellent.
I speak as someone who lived in a country that was about as car centric as USA, and moved to NL, where it's largely the opposite, with the exception of smaller towns, where a car still is honestly necessary to have a half decent life.
The interesting thing was... Driving a car, when needed, is far more pleasant in the Netherlands, which is very focused on other modes of transportation.
Driving a car, when needed, is far more pleasant in the Netherlands, which is very focused on other modes of transportation.
More pleasant than where in the US...? The Netherlands is barely more than a city-state, so seems like a big generalization to compare driving there against the entire US
Driving a car is more pleasant than anywhere in my car centric home country, South Africa. And it has nothing to do with South Africa, and everything to do with how the car infrastructure in NL is carefully balanced against too much car use.
And no, 18 million people isn't city state size. But yes, it's not a mega country, however, that doesn't really change the argument.
In my experience driving around Amsterdam and it's suburbs is better by a long shot than any American city I have visited or lived in(live in chicago and been to most known American cities) basically all the suburbs of America are sooooo annoying to drive in.
You’re correct, and the answer is not much. There is a “high speed” train across the northeast corridor, but it’s not a bullet train as it runs slower. They are expanding the service range of this type of train into the southeast, though, which is good.
Imagine a line Boston - New-York - Washington - Charlotte - Atlanta - Miami. Get on board in Boston in the evening, wake up in Miami the next morning ?
Okay, so 350km an hour translates to 4200 km over 12 hours (say 8pm to 8am). Imagine boarding a train in NYC at 8 in the evening after work and waking up in Denver to go skiing with your buddies the next morning. Sounds pretty cool.
It's one thing for a one-party dictatorship to engage in this kind of vanity project, but most US rail companies gave up passenger service for economic reasons. How many people are actually going to Denver to ski?
Listen, I like the idea of high-speed rails, and I am NOT about to defend our public transit infrastructure, it's definitely one of our weak points, and it's perfectly OK to admit to our shortcomings. Plus, trains are kinda neat.
Because even though they give Americans shit for the edited videos of us not knowing geography, they are equally unable to comprehend perspectives outside their own as any of us.
To them it’s unthinkable not to have rail to get around, and therefore we must be living in hardship because we don’t. They’re just giving up the ghost that they actually are at least as insular as Americans and probably more so because we are able to laugh at the things we do poorly unlike them.
EDIT: Posting here as a European guy sucks. This sub is a massive circlejerk. If you don't comment how great the US is, you get downvoted into oblivion, even if you just wanna post ideas on how Americans can improve. Sad.
I wanna start off sayibg that foreigners aren't mad at Americans for this. We just think it's laughable that "the greatest country on earth" doesn't get their shit together.
We cannot understand how there still is no highspeed train network in the US Or even plans to build one.
Like for example, in Europe they introducted a Railway Directive in 2012, and since then we now have French/Italian highspeed trains in Spain (and viceversa), a whole bunch of new highspeed lines AND commitments to better connect multiple countries.
China only took 10 years to connect most of entire country.
We just think it's laughable that "the greatest country on earth" doesn't get their shit together.
Why do you think high-speed rail is a sign of a country having its shit together?
We cannot understand how there still is no highspeed train network in the US Or even plans to build one.
Understand this: There is no significant demand or will for such a thing. It's not remotely practical outside of a few corridors, and its practicality is at least questionable even in those.
China only took 10 years to connect most of entire country.
China also doesn't give half a shit about environmental impacts or running roughshod over its citizens to build such a thing (at a questionable quality as well). The U.S. is far from perfect in these regards, but it's at least somewhat more restrained in these departments. It's also clear that few thoughts were given to practicality or maintenance costs, and the result is that the HSR network in that country is running quite deep in the red.
Yeah, sloppily built with loads of corruption, running at a massive deficit, all because a slower train line would make their government lose face. US has air travel, China's military controls the Airways, making air travel delayed, slow and unreliable, US doesn't.
It’s not laughable. I had this conversation with Germans when its was West Germany who had 65 million people living in a land the size of Oregon who had 3 million people. Oregon having Germany’s rail lines would be 98% barely if ever used
America has the largest rail system on the planet. It’s about 1.5 longer than Chinese. While I am a big fan of passenger rail, too, I realize that in the US people are wealthy enough to own personal transport for short travel and fly for longer distances. So we don’t have high speed not because we are somehow incapable of building it but because there is no demand
That's what these people don't get: actual rich people in actual wealthy countries own a car and drive places on their schedule in their plush car, or they take an airplane.
Comac make a narrow body jet that has been in service for a few years now.
I guess given their population having everyone flying would very quickly fill the air and not leave space for international flights.
They have much more respected assistance than most countries.
Also even in Europe lots of countries have already or are considering banning internal flights or just short flights in general for environmental reasons. As rail travel is much better for the environment than flying.
I am aware of COMAC existence but a plane maker that sources about half of its components from outside of China doesn’t really qualify, in my mind. That’s especially true given that the engines (sort of an important component) come from GE.
European nations do a lot of things which aren’t necessarily wise but do sound good for the purposes of virtue signaling. A case in point, I flew from Barcelona to Seville for $64 and it took me 1.5 hrs to get there. I could have opted for high speed train (Spain is the champion of high speed rail in Europe) and it would have taken me about 6.5 hrs and about $280. If Spanish government were to ban domestic air travel who would benefit from that? Definitely not the traveling public. Environment? Maybe, maybe not. Modern airplanes are pretty efficient and there is very little infrastructure to maintain when it comes to airplanes but maintaining rail over thousands of miles is far more energy demanding
The issue here is that when people compare energy expenditures and pollution they are calculating weight moved x distance and that obviously will always have trains in a more preferred position. But that’s not how it should be looked upon.
You also have to factor it thousands of miles of rail produced, installed, and maintained. The energy consumed by the airports aren’t even consumed by the airplanes, it’s consumed by the commercial outlets that are housed at the airports. Pretty much the only energy and pollution that you have to factor in when it comes to air travel would be the airplanes themselves, that’s isn’t so with the trains.
The largest polluters on the planet are China and India, not France. French banning domestic air travel will have negligible impact on the environment on the worldwide scale but very felt impact on the traveling public in France.
Yes, the companies and nations cooperate, obviously, but America can build a passenger jet from scratch while China, at least at the moment, cannot. That was my point. So a Chinese calling the US “third world” because we don’t have high speed rail is comical .
So essentially it's not anyone else's problem apart from the worst polluters?
Especially asthough those polluters are also the largest countries in the world so would be the highest polluters either way? Even if they were fairly green.
We all have to do our parts. No one country being green will fix a global issue.
I mean China is the world’s largest CO2 producer by far. Both the U.S. and EU are trending down.
Once nuclear fusion becomes viable we’ll fully adopt it and gift it to the rest of the world giving us basically unlimited pollution free energy which we can then use to adopt energy intensive infrastructure, like mag lev trains and wide scale carbon capture technology, thus ending the climate crisis.
China produces 20% of the global output, the U.S. produces 18% in USD. China produces 12.7 billion pounds of CO2, the U.S. produces 4.8 billion pounds. Holding the U.S. to the same output to emissions ratio the U.S. should be producing 11.4 billion pounds of CO2. So, how is the U.S. not doing their part exactly?
The figures I have seen are closer to 32% for China and 16% for the US.
However it's not as simple as that.
For every high tech MRI machine that the US makes (an example as the US typically makes more high value goods compared to china) China could have turned out 100,000 toasters.
Assuming a value of $2m for an MRI machine and $20 for a toaster.
China set itself up as the place to produce cheap goods and the western economies stopped producing cheap goods and pivoted to more premium or advanced goods.
So a solely monetary based comparison doesn't take into account the huge difference in actual volume of things produced and how much that affects pollution.
Also it's not a "US, you need to save the world" call out from the rest of the world. It's a "we all need to do our part".
Unfortunately being Australia we'd build it charge like $1000 a ticket and then declare the entire thing a failure because nobody uses it.
Something urbanists always ignore when fetishizing Japan is that 1. corporations are able to mandate method of commute for employees. If your job says no bikes? No bikes. Commuting by train is basically mandatory.
But 2. while Japan is largely car dependent outside of major city centers, the national freeway system is almost 100% toll roads, and usually costs just about the same as an HSR or plane ticket to get anywhere you want to go. Also, on regular streets, the traffic engineering is basically designed for maximum congestion.
In other words, mass transit here isn't successful organically, it works because you're basically stripped of any better options. You can take the car on overcrowded, congested roads for 10 hrs. and pay 10,000 yen - or take overcrowded transit for 2 hrs. and pay 10,000 yen per person. Hm. Tough choice. No, no sarcasm, it's genuinely not an easy choice.
Oh, and 3. the transit here isn't public, it's partially privatized. So corporations forcing you to commute by train is actually just a feedback loop of two corporations working for each other.
If you look up the stats, car ownership here is a little over one per household - which means for every household in Tokyo or Osaka without a car, there's a household in the suburbs with two or three. It costs a lot to own a car - parking fees, mandatory biannual maintenance fees, taxes - and you need the car, but you're nickel and dimed into taking transit anyway.
It's actually great for corporations- the mandatory maintenance fees mean cars lose value rapidly, basically forcing people to buy a new car or pay more than its worth in fees. Of course, the car's still fine, so another corporation can take it off your hands free of charge then sell it overseas.
Anyway, tl:dr, if Australia's worried about people being priced out of HSR, just do what Japan does and take away all the other options!
They rolled it out broadly, rather than installing it primarily in the areas where it would be reasonably utilized. As a result, many corridors are heavily underutilized.
Boston to Baltimore, Texas triangle, LA to Seattle, NY to Chicago, high speed rail would be pretty great.
However any distance beyond those stretches of a couple hundred miles cost of infrastructure and speed of travel are just too poor to justify. We have planes when you need to get somewhere in a hurry and cars/ busses/ passenger trains when you don't.
I don’t know why they consider Amerimutt as an insult anyways. If immigrants keep our birth rates up and are a big factor in population and economic growth then I say let them in 👍
Everyone is so impressed with high speed rail in China and Japan. Cars are expensive AF there because of the government, our government definitely increases the price of ours too but just the fees in China are crazy.
Europe just has trains to cross the countries and it works just fine.
Not to mention most people have cars here. That way we can travel whenever we want.
Is my imagination why our vaccine actually works, or have your ccp masters not opened up your country yet? A truly developed country locks down long after the pandemic ends because the government doesn't want the public to know their vaccine doesn't work /s.
Ameriamutts? Is the word mutt really considered a derogatory these days? I think it’s better than being inbreed. lol
I’ve only had two dogs in my life. Loved them both. My first was a ‘purebred’ but she had a lot of health issues after a few years and sadly didn’t live long. My one now is a “mutt” but so far, so good. This idea of genetic purity is better is a dated one.
We just drive our vehicles or get in an airplane and go there in a few hours using our numerous airports and our advanced system of roads and affordable gas.
High speed trains are cool, but America is nearly 26 times larger than a place like Japan, Japan having 378,000 kilometers land mass(smaller than California)compared to 9.8 million in the U.S, so think about the cost alone to have bullet train tracks built across that much land,we already have perfectly fine interstates, if you want to get somewhere quicker go to the godamn airport.
The other important note here is that there needs to be a great need for this kind of thing. The US East Coast may be able to benefit but how many people need to get from Seattle to San Diego in six hours and not fly? I bet the American Aviation system essentially nullifies the need for great investment into high speed rail
Who? I’ve traveled by public transport the majority or my life. But I’ve rarely seen property being damaged by other people. Most trains here are in good shape and clean.
Just recently, there was a story from NYC of a man randomly setting a sleeping woman on fire. No prior association, he just saw her sleeping on the subway and decided to set her on fire.
Tf you mean who? People bro. Your entire country is about double the population of just New York city. I'd love 330 million people to live where you do and see if your answer remains the same
Once again third world has nothing to do with development.
I would love high speed trains but one our burocracy won't allow it. (Nothing tovdovwith capitalism or development. ) and two its not as economical as it would appear.
Oh I saw this guy floating before. He really hates bread and cheese for some reason. No wonder he's so bitter he never had the joy of a grilled cheese.
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