I've spoken at length to an Amtrak employee (some kind of planner) about the northeast corridor, and he said the limitation on speed is about track location, not money. To get faster trains, you need straighter tracks, to limit turning; and to get straighter tracks, you need to move tracks from where they are, to where they ideally should be; that means lots and lots of eminent domain, lawsuits, and petty local political controversies. Getting Acela on the NEC was a political process much more than an engineering process. Other countries have their own political complexities, but generally speaking they either have stronger central planning (China, Korea), they built their tracks at a point in their development where infrastructure and property were "reset" because of being bombed (Japan, Germany), or other particular combinations of events.
(Sorry, both a rail and rail history fan here, so excuse the rant.)
That proposed Madison-Chicago route is incredibly dumb --- even if you start from the premise that a Madison-Chicago route is a good idea.
The fact that the proposed route has a cusp at Madison should raise red flags because train tracks can't have cusps. This got me to do some research, and the short version is that geography prohibits a reasonable MSP-MSN-MKE-CHI train route. In fact, despite that fact that Madison was at one time simultaneously served by three major railroads --- each offering MSN-CHI trains --- none ever ran a MSP-MSN-MKE-CHI train because it never made sense: If you draw a straight line between MSP and CHI, you'll find that it goes right thru MSN, so no points for guessing that a MSP-MSN-CHI route was one of the first railroads thru the area. However, that means that MKE is (by definition) out of the way. Later, railroads focused on MSP-MKE-CHI routes because the terrain was easier (and because MKE was a more important city), but then MSN was out of the way. Hence the weird cusp in the map: Amtrak is trying to run a route that never existed before (because it never made sense), and they have to knit together railroads that weren't made for that purpose. The train would have to either make an awkward maneuver in Madison to turn around (using a wye) or else go forwards into Madison and backwards out of Madison. In other words, MSP-MSN-MKE-CHI service would by necessity slow down MSP-MKE-CHI service.
The right way to do MSN-CHI service is by using part of the old MSP-MSN-CHI route. That section still exists as a railroad. In fact, about half of it is already a passenger line, so it wouldn't take much upgrading! (It's part of the Chicago Metra's UP-NW commuter line that runs to Harvard, IL, which is nearly at the IL-WI border.) In WI, much of the track route is publicly owned, which probably makes it simpler to upgrade. There's a section of Union Pacific track between the commuter line and the publicly-owned track, but I'm sure they would upgrade it if offered money. (In fact, as the name "UP-NW" suggests, the commuter line is owned by Union Pacific. They're not opposed to upgrading their track to passenger-rail speeds.) My guess is that, for the price of the Moynihan Train Hall, you could probably have moderate-speed MSN-CHI service.
FWIW, it's conceivable that MSN-CHI could be run as a Metra line. There's already precedent for Metra operating in WI (it has a station in Kenosha, WI). I'm not sure if that would be an improvement over Amtrak, but at least it gives options; I have limited experience with Metra, but it has been better than my experience with Amtrak outside the NEC.
Amtrak doesn't need to expand long haul routes or ones with low ridership.
If any money is sent to Amtrak, they need to get the busy routes in sturdy condition with speed and safety objectives.
I'm talking the Northeast corridor first, get the new tunnel under the Hudson started, and the same for any other routes in the country that are busy enough to justify the first round of available money.
The sweet spot for trains is around 500 miles, otherwise flying is faster, cheaper, etc. The Northeast and Mid atlantic and Southeast have so much air traffic that there's a limit to future growth even with GPS guidance replacing radar.
Driving 500 miles sucks, so that's when the train is the perfect mode of travel. It's smooth, quiet and lulls you to sleep even now in the Northeast corridor. It's the most luxurious way to travel.
NC already got what most states didn't....$600 million from Obama's high speed rail initiative and NC spent all of it bolstering the Raleigh to Charlotte tracks, Union station in Raleigh, and some freight terminals in Charlotte soon.
So I don't agree that expansion inside NC right now is urgent enough for this rare funding.
But I do think that resurrecting the S line beelining from Raleigh to Richmond is worthy of some funding. now that VA owns all of it and NC owns it's portion, there's but 100 miles that separates NC"s successful railroad from the Northeast Corridor.
Virginia is going all in with rail, and I predict the two states will cough up the $4 billion to reinstate the S line which will bring D.C. to possibly 3-3.5 hours from Raleigh making day trips very doable, and the nation's capital will always be enlightening for the public to want to do those day trips.
After that, I think faster rail from Charlotte to Atlanta is justified as the population of North Georgia is already over 7 million, and upstate SC is the most populated region of SC and it's just a hugely significant industrial corridor.
NC once again had their shovel ready ducks in a row and that's why they got $600 million. I think they'll be given more because the planning has already been fleshed out
The money should go to where it would be best spent, the best places to invest in infrastructure is where the people are, the people are in dense coastal areas, but our dear senate is heavily weighted against dense coastal areas, so Democrats following just this logic are looking at a Senate map massively tilted against them.
That doesn't mean that investing in useless non-high speed rail in the midwest is the answer.
But MY does need to write something about what infrastructure projects need to be paid for in the midwest instead, to actually help people there and get Democratic senators elected.
Maybe it's actually freight train? Cash money from helicopters? idk. If not investment then then ideas for how to make a the politics work.
Should we not privatize the NEC rail system specifically, while leaving government-subsidized rail to the lower-density population centers? What Would Musk Do with the NEC?
To be clear, I'm not advocating that we hand over NEC railways to Elon Musk. What I'm suggesting is that Musk-like people (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bezos, etc...) are iconoclastic leaders who make shit happen in our unique, bizarre, and definitively non-slow-boring culture.
Competency would be great! But this kind of problem requires some star power I believe to shift it away from the existing trajectory.
Why on earth would we want to find out what the owner of the the 13th largest automobile manufacturer in the US (by unit sales) would want to do with a major railroad?
Look, I realize that there is no more futile exercise on the internet than trying to convince people that Elon Musk and Tony Stark are not the same people, but so far Musk's "innovative" ideas about mass transit have boiled down to (a) digging up a vacuum train idea that was discarded decades ago for extremely good reasons and so far producing nothing even close to a commercially viable system out of it, and (b) using an off-the-shelf tunnel boring machine to build tunnels to run cars through. Tesla and SpaceX are both legitimate success stories, but Musk has demonstrated the opposite of any ability to generate equivalent success in the mass transit space so far, and not for lack of trying.
I'd like to see Musk build an actual working passenger service hyperloop track on easy mode (let's say a green-field track between an airport and major city center with no major hills or valleys in the way) before handing him the keys to the biggest passenger railroad in north america.
Get Janette Sadik-Khan if you want that. And maybe give her free rein to pay Andy Byford what he wants.
Musk's relation to transit is more like Cuomo's, where the point is about getting attention and sounding clickbaity, not actually doing something successful.
Fair, but honestly? We are so far behind the curve here that I think I'd like to find out what an averagely-competent manager from Deutsche Bahn, Japan Rail or Renfe would do before letting a 'visionary' have the controls. Innovation is great, but "operating at the basic standard of service of the rest of the world" would be an enormous improvement on the status quo here.
Yes, this is what Mr. Slow Boring advocates but there's a reason why that will never happen and why folks like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs change the world - because they do it in a very not-slow-boring fashion. Evidence, my friend. Follow the science! :)
Re-inventing the modern production facility (Ford), re-inventing the smart phone (Jobs), re-inventing the EV (Musk), re-inventing refrigerators (Durrant), etc., have worked out for American prosperity and global dominance pretty well in most estimations.
The gains made by inventing the future end up being light-years far greater than the costs created by walking away from existing technologies and mental models.
I feel like this ends up being a philosophical debate between innovation optimists (like me) and innovation pessimists who feel what we have now is good enough.
It's design vs. leverage. I'm firmly in the design camp. So much so that I built a whole consultancy around using design techniques to address the toughest customer needs.
The advantage of hyperloop over conventional high speed rail is for extremely long segments with no stops. If you have to stop every hundred miles or so, then it doesn't matter what your top speed is, because you can't accelerate and decelerate any faster than high speed rail does if you want humans to ride it without vomiting.
On top of that, if you want to go faster than high speed rail then you need even straighter tracks (or tubes or whatever) than high speed rail needs.
I could imagine Hyperloop being what you'd go for if you're looking for a Denver-to-Minneapolis solution. But for northeast corridor, it seems better to build on what you have, rather than redo all the urban areas as well as the slowdowns between the cities.
The NEC is 456 miles long. So far the largest _actually built_ hyperloop track made is the SpaceX test track, which is... three quarters of a mile long, and the current record holder of their track speed competitions is a team from the University of Munich, which built a pod that achieved a top speed of 284mph, which is only slightly faster than the N700 Shinkensen, which can be bought off the shelf right now and travels in the open air.
It's certainly possible that hyperloop might one day be a useful mass transit technology. Plenty of things are possible. But it's decades away from being ready for prime time, and that's before you even consider questions like "how many trillions of dollars would it cost to convert the NEC route into a vacuum tube?" (The answer is: many many trillions.)
When my spouse and I honeymooned in Spain, about a decade ago, we flew into Madrid and then took the AVE high-speed train to Barcelona... Not sure how it is these days, but at least at the time, the AVE was a far better experience than flying -- comfy seats, a dining car that was offering cava and not-bad tapas, etc. There's no reason we couldn't have that level of service on good routes -- the NEC obviously, but also NY to Chicago (and then maybe to Detroit?) and on the west coast, at least SD to LA to SF, and then maybe up to Sacramento, Portland, and Seattle (although those northerly legs are longer, and it's trickier to compete with air, though if air had to price in a fair carbon cost it might work out).
“Similarly, while Pittsburgh to Philadelphia HSR via Harrisburg is an appealing vision for the state of Philadelphia, there are just not that many people living in Pittsburgh. But with NEC HSR already in place, then you get the onward connections for free to NYC and D.C. to make it pencil out.”
Going through Philly makes sense for Pittsburgh to NYC, but this high speed route will never happen because the Alleghenies are in the way.
Pittsburgh-Philly-DC is just silly. Harrisburg hasn’t much further from DC than Philly. You are adding so much distance (roughly 110 miles, plus the curves through the mountains) that this will never pencil out. Pittsburgh to DC is a natural air/car route.
Yeah, any HSR route through PA west of Harrisburg would have to be new-build, since the existing twisty lines up the Juniata couldn't handle it. The most realistic plans I've seen would largely parallel (as in run in practically the same right-of-way) as the Turnpike, but then you still have to blast new tunnel through the mountains. Whether *that* pencils out depends on (1) whether you can get tunneling costs down to Swiss levels (which, who knows) (2) whether you build the Chicago-Pittsburgh connection (which, if you do build to Pittsburgh, why not) and (3) whether Chicago-NYC/Chicago-DC via Pittsburgh is viable (legit dunno: MY seems to think it might be; Alon Levy seems skeptical but hasn't ruled it out).
The politics of infrastructure funding is to create a lot of government funded jobs for the next election cycle, with less concern for actually building anything useful (several election cycles down the road). In my area an Obama era highway project is still under construction.
The current president is, like, the country's single biggest Amtrak fan. Why isn't he twisting some arms to get some cool shit done along the lines of what Matthew is proposing?
Matt - your work on our passenger rail system by itself is worth the annual subscription price. I would love to see your work championed by more legislators. How can we help make that happen? Could you rough up a script for us that covers the salient points in your plan and allow us to organize our contacts to call their Reps and get this on their radar?
Because I am feeling more than a little bullshit sensitive today let me add this. One thing no HSR system I have ever ridden, or any conventional Amtrak train for that matter, has is baggage security. They don't examine it. They mostly don't even handle it. I hope no one ever thinks to make a HSR train a target for a bomb or something. That would be unfortunate. Is there any evidence anyone would take advantage of these easy targets? Yes. Plenty. Mostly on commuter trains to be sure but the problem remains. It will be interesting to see how long it would take to add such facilities as baggage handling, loading and unloading and inspection once it is discovered it is needed.
That's a policy decision. There's nothing inherent wrt high speed rail that requires security laxity. Here in China you go through the whole monty to board a train (x-rayed luggage, security guards waiving detector wands around your body, etc). Heck, I've literally never entered a Chinese *subway station* that didn't have comprehensive security including bag scans, explosive detection equipment and so forth.
This strikes me as a little unnecessary. It might be more to do with the desire of the Chinese state to avoid the embarrassment of a terrorist attack against their HSR system.
- You could probably kill as many people in a nightclub.
Nothing requires security laxity - but the point is that there's also nothing that requires extra-high security. If you're on an airplane, then the plane itself can become a weapon that can target anything on the surface of the earth. But a train can't be used as a weapon unless your target has the foresight to put itself on the tracks.
Yep. And you need physical space to do that. And staff. So when you start laying out plans for HSR terminals you probably should include that. Which also affects trip times. And costs.
But a properly sized and fueled jet can go pretty much anywhere and crash into anything. You hijack a train and you're still stuck on the tracks. A train bombing/hijacking just isn't as photogenic.
Here is an introduction to physics. What if you just explode a bomb on a train and or derail it on the ground. I'd look up the equation for momentum if I were you. How many passengers do you think would survive given what happens in much lower speed incidents. You can't shoot a plane out of the sky unless you have some serious military hardware. Any idiot could blow up HSR lines with an IED. I expect many will also pooh pooh this possibility. But Homeland Security doesn't.
High-speed trains are rather more resistant to (on-board) bombings than planes. Look up the Carlos the Jackal TGV bombings. The train was damaged and people died, but it stayed on the tracks.
If it had been a plane most likely all would have been killed.
Admittedly the possibility of an IED attack on *the tracks* raises a different spectre. But this possibility can be mitigated with good surveillance.
And anything can be a target, anyway. A terrorist attack can very easily be carried out at a cafe or a restaurant for example.
I don't see why this would be any more of an issue than a school or a mall or a concert or a subway.
The reason planes need extra security is that a plane can be used as a weapon to target an even bigger target than any of these, like a skyscraper. But a train can't target anything, so it doesn't need any more security than any other place that has a few hundred people in it at once.
Cuban healthcare. Amtrak expansion plans. Look, I know that Slow Boring subscriptions have slipped a bit, but is it necessary to go so totally clickbait? It's like reading Buzzfeed.
I can think of few areas of engineered transport systems more subject to bullshit than HSR. Whatever preconceptions you might have about this mode of transportation can be cured by taking it. And paying attention to what you are seeing. You often see throwaway lines praising the comfort of HSR. There's actually a very good reason for that. Which is that you can't do what airlines have done to increase seating capacity in response to demand. That's because if you did make seats narrower and added seats you would then have to eliminate whole rows of seats to increase luggage capacity. Which, by the way, sucks badly. If you are doing anything beyond a day trip, say going on vacation, you will have luggage. Which is piled in inadequate storage at the front of each car in racks. and you will discover when you try to find yours that someone has rearranged the pile and it isn't where you left it. The knock effects of this are evident to those who have eyeballs.
HSR is reliant on having few stops. Which means it serves fewer and fewer people. There is nothing more deceptive than HSR maps that suggest the connecting lines provide service. They don't. Those are just lines where people can't catch trains and get to watch them go by. And that brings me to the goofiest of HSR conceptions which is that terminals should be located anywhere near city centers. That is just stupid. Not only is that the most expensive place to build a terminal but it never has the room for ancillary facilities like baggage handling or short and long term parking or car rentals that would make it a convenient alternative to driving directly or taking a plane where all those conveniences exist.
It wouldn't matter how fast the trains run on those proposed Amtrak routes presuming you could, at enormous expense, rebuild the right of ways to run HSR. You would have to eliminate almost all Amtrak stops or it wouldn't be HSR. And, btw, if you want to build new dedicated right of ways for HSR you should stop using European costs per kilometer of track laid and add number of over/under passes you need to build per kilometer. Which is much higher in the US than anywhere in Europe except maybe Germany.
Within limits you can. Subject to terminal capacity which varies. My point is that you shouldn't have to. It's really not that hard to design a proper baggage handling system with a train that stops at only a few places. Stop length for unloading would be dramatically shortened and turnaround time improved. And you would obviously be able to add more seats in the passenger cars. Sorting baggage on the train is dumb. I don't think Matthew, as part of his Great Boarding Crusade, has given much thought to how rail works outside of the metropolitan areas where he uses them.
I'll assume you managed to ignore all the seniors, or mothers with young children or those with disabilities in your travels. And you don't know any.
I've literally never seen a platform level the train door on Amtrak. Admittedly the vast majority of my trips have been between Detroit and Chicago. Plus a few longer pleasure excursions where I did not give a damn about how long it took. What I have seen is that Amtrak loads passengers into cars based on their destinations. Why is this necessary? Because most of their stops along the Detroit /Chicago route that also provides local transportation needs have very short platforms that are often not even two cars lengths long. Which means everybody getting off there has to be in the same car unless you want to keep shuttling the train forward to allow safe exit. They also have staff to assist people who require it to load baggage, or baby carriages or people with disabilities. Making that easier would be a good place to spend money.
But keep in mind that if you ever want to change an engineering parameter like deck height or platform height or standoff from track gauge you had better get it right. You are stuck with it. The French had to spend about a hundred million bucks to modify their train platforms, thousands of them, because their new wider cars hit the old platforms.
Well if you paid attention to what I said, which you didn't, the standards in dense metropolitan areas are not the same as everywhere else. And it is a mistake to assume they are. I specifically said that. Read more carefully. About those old French train platforms? The authority in France that decided the new cars were fine only checked the platforms built to the latest standard which, at the time, was thirty years old. The thousands of platforms that predated the new standard? They didn't check those and they outnumbered the newer platforms.
You should get out of your NEC bubble. Believe or not there are people out there who can vote.
That's funny. Because I have noticed the same baggage handling issue every time. I do agree that almost everyone's conception of what rail should be is based exactly on their personal needs. And you very clearly want a system dedicated to your needs where you never need to touch your car. We'll leave aside your observations on China since they are irrelevant to the issues in the US.
My conceptions are based entirely on very pragmatic engineering. If your goal is, for environmental reasons , to displace traffic from air or road travel then you need passengers over a much larger geographical area, suburban or rural who are going to want to get to the terminal. Just as they would an airport. If you want to say that a city centered terminal has the the public transport to reach the terminal I will suggest that works both ways. You can use it to get to a terminal outside the city center. And then that terminal will also be more readily accessible to people with cars over a much larger area. And it will cost much less to build. You would have room for parking and baggage handling just like airports. And dedicated baggage handling with dedicated fast unloading baggage cars. And baggage carousels. And when you discover you need it, baggage inspection.
I have schlepped baggage all over the world and I know what I want. I know where I live. And I know what kind of rail service suits me and many other people. If you want it designed around your particular needs that's fine. I'm not in. It doesn't make sense.
Did you, on your many short commuter trips, notice any level crossings? I'll bet you did. Guess what? You can't have those with high speed rail. Unless you are willing to accept the occasional mass casualty event when some idiot is stopped on the tracks. If you have taken HSR anywhere you will indeed catch glimpses of far off scenery. But mostly you will see protective berms and fencing designed to prevent access to the tracks.
Yes. And if you want to build HSR in the US then that corridor is the place to put it. The idea that all rail money should be devoted to that particular problem while basically ignoring all other rail needs fast or slow is politically ludicrous. It borders on Sunrise Movement obliviousness. I have no problem with some federal level funding for this venture. Many citizens live there. But nothing stops them from proceeding on a state level with undertaking all the extensive engineering it will require. And that is a lot.
Quite a lot of my objections to the more general conception of HSR is based on their Field of Dreams philosophy. If you build it passengers will come. Well that isn't going to happen with a city center to city center design philosophy. Which really only serves the interests of people living in or near a city center.
Yes. In cities that aren't too spread out. But American cities are. The NEC is very interesting. It's where Amtrak almost makes money. The argument in favor of HSR is that it's very high cost will be repaid in higher ridership. My argument is that this idea is very suspect unless it is accompanied by facilities that will draw people from larger geographical areas with different transportation needs. There's an upper limit on the number of people who live in city central locations who's travel habits, car or air, will be displaced by a city central terminal. Most of them will be using public transit anyway. It's the passengers from farther out that you want to add.
If trillions of military spending and Joe Biden’s decades of foreign policy leadership get you the current situation in Afghanistan, $66 billion should just about cover the planning costs of maybe getting up to modern speeds sometime this century.
What about government programs and Amtrak management makes MY think normal budgets are in play? MY is the one who writes about the ruinous costs of public transit construction in the US all the time.
Your supposition doesn’t explain any of the abject public failures in blue cities in blue states. Couldn’t fund public transit adequately because of cost overruns and pension / debt obligations, couldn’t conduct competitive maintenance on public housing. Boondoggles.
Your argument is that if the government publicized (the opposite of privatized) all of parts of public infrastructure, R&D, healthcare, etc. we would have cheaper & better options.
Can you help me understand how the results would be very different from education which remains almost entirely government run, has seen a doubling of gdp allocated to it, and few look at as a rousing success?
To be clear - I think you are correct that the loss of expertise in government functions has made some of these worse, but I don't think that is the panacea either.
The first part makes sense to me. I think that building internal expertise is a critically important part of effective government that is often overlooked.
I'm curious about the second part - stopping the revolving door. I've heard that around lobbying for a while, but never been quite sure how you could stop that effectively.
I've spoken at length to an Amtrak employee (some kind of planner) about the northeast corridor, and he said the limitation on speed is about track location, not money. To get faster trains, you need straighter tracks, to limit turning; and to get straighter tracks, you need to move tracks from where they are, to where they ideally should be; that means lots and lots of eminent domain, lawsuits, and petty local political controversies. Getting Acela on the NEC was a political process much more than an engineering process. Other countries have their own political complexities, but generally speaking they either have stronger central planning (China, Korea), they built their tracks at a point in their development where infrastructure and property were "reset" because of being bombed (Japan, Germany), or other particular combinations of events.
(Sorry, both a rail and rail history fan here, so excuse the rant.)
That proposed Madison-Chicago route is incredibly dumb --- even if you start from the premise that a Madison-Chicago route is a good idea.
The fact that the proposed route has a cusp at Madison should raise red flags because train tracks can't have cusps. This got me to do some research, and the short version is that geography prohibits a reasonable MSP-MSN-MKE-CHI train route. In fact, despite that fact that Madison was at one time simultaneously served by three major railroads --- each offering MSN-CHI trains --- none ever ran a MSP-MSN-MKE-CHI train because it never made sense: If you draw a straight line between MSP and CHI, you'll find that it goes right thru MSN, so no points for guessing that a MSP-MSN-CHI route was one of the first railroads thru the area. However, that means that MKE is (by definition) out of the way. Later, railroads focused on MSP-MKE-CHI routes because the terrain was easier (and because MKE was a more important city), but then MSN was out of the way. Hence the weird cusp in the map: Amtrak is trying to run a route that never existed before (because it never made sense), and they have to knit together railroads that weren't made for that purpose. The train would have to either make an awkward maneuver in Madison to turn around (using a wye) or else go forwards into Madison and backwards out of Madison. In other words, MSP-MSN-MKE-CHI service would by necessity slow down MSP-MKE-CHI service.
The right way to do MSN-CHI service is by using part of the old MSP-MSN-CHI route. That section still exists as a railroad. In fact, about half of it is already a passenger line, so it wouldn't take much upgrading! (It's part of the Chicago Metra's UP-NW commuter line that runs to Harvard, IL, which is nearly at the IL-WI border.) In WI, much of the track route is publicly owned, which probably makes it simpler to upgrade. There's a section of Union Pacific track between the commuter line and the publicly-owned track, but I'm sure they would upgrade it if offered money. (In fact, as the name "UP-NW" suggests, the commuter line is owned by Union Pacific. They're not opposed to upgrading their track to passenger-rail speeds.) My guess is that, for the price of the Moynihan Train Hall, you could probably have moderate-speed MSN-CHI service.
FWIW, it's conceivable that MSN-CHI could be run as a Metra line. There's already precedent for Metra operating in WI (it has a station in Kenosha, WI). I'm not sure if that would be an improvement over Amtrak, but at least it gives options; I have limited experience with Metra, but it has been better than my experience with Amtrak outside the NEC.
Vancouver/Seattle/Portland/Eugene seems worth investing in.
Amtrak doesn't need to expand long haul routes or ones with low ridership.
If any money is sent to Amtrak, they need to get the busy routes in sturdy condition with speed and safety objectives.
I'm talking the Northeast corridor first, get the new tunnel under the Hudson started, and the same for any other routes in the country that are busy enough to justify the first round of available money.
The sweet spot for trains is around 500 miles, otherwise flying is faster, cheaper, etc. The Northeast and Mid atlantic and Southeast have so much air traffic that there's a limit to future growth even with GPS guidance replacing radar.
Driving 500 miles sucks, so that's when the train is the perfect mode of travel. It's smooth, quiet and lulls you to sleep even now in the Northeast corridor. It's the most luxurious way to travel.
NC already got what most states didn't....$600 million from Obama's high speed rail initiative and NC spent all of it bolstering the Raleigh to Charlotte tracks, Union station in Raleigh, and some freight terminals in Charlotte soon.
So I don't agree that expansion inside NC right now is urgent enough for this rare funding.
But I do think that resurrecting the S line beelining from Raleigh to Richmond is worthy of some funding. now that VA owns all of it and NC owns it's portion, there's but 100 miles that separates NC"s successful railroad from the Northeast Corridor.
Virginia is going all in with rail, and I predict the two states will cough up the $4 billion to reinstate the S line which will bring D.C. to possibly 3-3.5 hours from Raleigh making day trips very doable, and the nation's capital will always be enlightening for the public to want to do those day trips.
After that, I think faster rail from Charlotte to Atlanta is justified as the population of North Georgia is already over 7 million, and upstate SC is the most populated region of SC and it's just a hugely significant industrial corridor.
NC once again had their shovel ready ducks in a row and that's why they got $600 million. I think they'll be given more because the planning has already been fleshed out
The money should go to where it would be best spent, the best places to invest in infrastructure is where the people are, the people are in dense coastal areas, but our dear senate is heavily weighted against dense coastal areas, so Democrats following just this logic are looking at a Senate map massively tilted against them.
That doesn't mean that investing in useless non-high speed rail in the midwest is the answer.
But MY does need to write something about what infrastructure projects need to be paid for in the midwest instead, to actually help people there and get Democratic senators elected.
Maybe it's actually freight train? Cash money from helicopters? idk. If not investment then then ideas for how to make a the politics work.
Should we not privatize the NEC rail system specifically, while leaving government-subsidized rail to the lower-density population centers? What Would Musk Do with the NEC?
To be clear, I'm not advocating that we hand over NEC railways to Elon Musk. What I'm suggesting is that Musk-like people (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bezos, etc...) are iconoclastic leaders who make shit happen in our unique, bizarre, and definitively non-slow-boring culture.
Competency would be great! But this kind of problem requires some star power I believe to shift it away from the existing trajectory.
Why on earth would we want to find out what the owner of the the 13th largest automobile manufacturer in the US (by unit sales) would want to do with a major railroad?
Because innovative thinkers are the ones that recast existing expectations.
Look, I realize that there is no more futile exercise on the internet than trying to convince people that Elon Musk and Tony Stark are not the same people, but so far Musk's "innovative" ideas about mass transit have boiled down to (a) digging up a vacuum train idea that was discarded decades ago for extremely good reasons and so far producing nothing even close to a commercially viable system out of it, and (b) using an off-the-shelf tunnel boring machine to build tunnels to run cars through. Tesla and SpaceX are both legitimate success stories, but Musk has demonstrated the opposite of any ability to generate equivalent success in the mass transit space so far, and not for lack of trying.
I'd like to see Musk build an actual working passenger service hyperloop track on easy mode (let's say a green-field track between an airport and major city center with no major hills or valleys in the way) before handing him the keys to the biggest passenger railroad in north america.
You're taking me too literally - WWMD is shorthand for what would a Type A, hard-driving, public - attention seeking visionary do?
Get Janette Sadik-Khan if you want that. And maybe give her free rein to pay Andy Byford what he wants.
Musk's relation to transit is more like Cuomo's, where the point is about getting attention and sounding clickbaity, not actually doing something successful.
Truth! But mojo goes a lot further than you'd think in the non-slow-boring universe that actually exists outside the rationalist movement.
Fair, but honestly? We are so far behind the curve here that I think I'd like to find out what an averagely-competent manager from Deutsche Bahn, Japan Rail or Renfe would do before letting a 'visionary' have the controls. Innovation is great, but "operating at the basic standard of service of the rest of the world" would be an enormous improvement on the status quo here.
Yes, this is what Mr. Slow Boring advocates but there's a reason why that will never happen and why folks like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs change the world - because they do it in a very not-slow-boring fashion. Evidence, my friend. Follow the science! :)
Re-inventing the modern production facility (Ford), re-inventing the smart phone (Jobs), re-inventing the EV (Musk), re-inventing refrigerators (Durrant), etc., have worked out for American prosperity and global dominance pretty well in most estimations.
The gains made by inventing the future end up being light-years far greater than the costs created by walking away from existing technologies and mental models.
I feel like this ends up being a philosophical debate between innovation optimists (like me) and innovation pessimists who feel what we have now is good enough.
It's design vs. leverage. I'm firmly in the design camp. So much so that I built a whole consultancy around using design techniques to address the toughest customer needs.
The advantage of hyperloop over conventional high speed rail is for extremely long segments with no stops. If you have to stop every hundred miles or so, then it doesn't matter what your top speed is, because you can't accelerate and decelerate any faster than high speed rail does if you want humans to ride it without vomiting.
On top of that, if you want to go faster than high speed rail then you need even straighter tracks (or tubes or whatever) than high speed rail needs.
I could imagine Hyperloop being what you'd go for if you're looking for a Denver-to-Minneapolis solution. But for northeast corridor, it seems better to build on what you have, rather than redo all the urban areas as well as the slowdowns between the cities.
Acceleration of a conventional trains is limited by adhesion of steel wheels on steel rails. And for HSR, relatively high-geared trains.
I'm not particularly defending hyperloop vs traditional HSR, as I mostly favour HSR.
I'm just saying rail acceleration / deceleration is typically no-where near the vomit threshold. Busses accelerate and brake harder.
The NEC is 456 miles long. So far the largest _actually built_ hyperloop track made is the SpaceX test track, which is... three quarters of a mile long, and the current record holder of their track speed competitions is a team from the University of Munich, which built a pod that achieved a top speed of 284mph, which is only slightly faster than the N700 Shinkensen, which can be bought off the shelf right now and travels in the open air.
It's certainly possible that hyperloop might one day be a useful mass transit technology. Plenty of things are possible. But it's decades away from being ready for prime time, and that's before you even consider questions like "how many trillions of dollars would it cost to convert the NEC route into a vacuum tube?" (The answer is: many many trillions.)
When my spouse and I honeymooned in Spain, about a decade ago, we flew into Madrid and then took the AVE high-speed train to Barcelona... Not sure how it is these days, but at least at the time, the AVE was a far better experience than flying -- comfy seats, a dining car that was offering cava and not-bad tapas, etc. There's no reason we couldn't have that level of service on good routes -- the NEC obviously, but also NY to Chicago (and then maybe to Detroit?) and on the west coast, at least SD to LA to SF, and then maybe up to Sacramento, Portland, and Seattle (although those northerly legs are longer, and it's trickier to compete with air, though if air had to price in a fair carbon cost it might work out).
PS: Can somebody get this piece in front of Secretary Mayor Pete? :-|
“Similarly, while Pittsburgh to Philadelphia HSR via Harrisburg is an appealing vision for the state of Philadelphia, there are just not that many people living in Pittsburgh. But with NEC HSR already in place, then you get the onward connections for free to NYC and D.C. to make it pencil out.”
Going through Philly makes sense for Pittsburgh to NYC, but this high speed route will never happen because the Alleghenies are in the way.
Pittsburgh-Philly-DC is just silly. Harrisburg hasn’t much further from DC than Philly. You are adding so much distance (roughly 110 miles, plus the curves through the mountains) that this will never pencil out. Pittsburgh to DC is a natural air/car route.
Yeah, any HSR route through PA west of Harrisburg would have to be new-build, since the existing twisty lines up the Juniata couldn't handle it. The most realistic plans I've seen would largely parallel (as in run in practically the same right-of-way) as the Turnpike, but then you still have to blast new tunnel through the mountains. Whether *that* pencils out depends on (1) whether you can get tunneling costs down to Swiss levels (which, who knows) (2) whether you build the Chicago-Pittsburgh connection (which, if you do build to Pittsburgh, why not) and (3) whether Chicago-NYC/Chicago-DC via Pittsburgh is viable (legit dunno: MY seems to think it might be; Alon Levy seems skeptical but hasn't ruled it out).
The PA turnpike is twisty even fir a car, plenty of places make 65mph seem fast.
Very true. Not sure how they'd deal. But that does seem to be the idea.
The politics of infrastructure funding is to create a lot of government funded jobs for the next election cycle, with less concern for actually building anything useful (several election cycles down the road). In my area an Obama era highway project is still under construction.
The current president is, like, the country's single biggest Amtrak fan. Why isn't he twisting some arms to get some cool shit done along the lines of what Matthew is proposing?
Because he's the country's single biggest Amtrak fan.
He's a defender of Amtrak (the currently existing organisation) who just thinks it's been hard done by.
Matt - your work on our passenger rail system by itself is worth the annual subscription price. I would love to see your work championed by more legislators. How can we help make that happen? Could you rough up a script for us that covers the salient points in your plan and allow us to organize our contacts to call their Reps and get this on their radar?
Because I am feeling more than a little bullshit sensitive today let me add this. One thing no HSR system I have ever ridden, or any conventional Amtrak train for that matter, has is baggage security. They don't examine it. They mostly don't even handle it. I hope no one ever thinks to make a HSR train a target for a bomb or something. That would be unfortunate. Is there any evidence anyone would take advantage of these easy targets? Yes. Plenty. Mostly on commuter trains to be sure but the problem remains. It will be interesting to see how long it would take to add such facilities as baggage handling, loading and unloading and inspection once it is discovered it is needed.
That's a policy decision. There's nothing inherent wrt high speed rail that requires security laxity. Here in China you go through the whole monty to board a train (x-rayed luggage, security guards waiving detector wands around your body, etc). Heck, I've literally never entered a Chinese *subway station* that didn't have comprehensive security including bag scans, explosive detection equipment and so forth.
This strikes me as a little unnecessary. It might be more to do with the desire of the Chinese state to avoid the embarrassment of a terrorist attack against their HSR system.
- You could probably kill as many people in a nightclub.
Nothing requires security laxity - but the point is that there's also nothing that requires extra-high security. If you're on an airplane, then the plane itself can become a weapon that can target anything on the surface of the earth. But a train can't be used as a weapon unless your target has the foresight to put itself on the tracks.
Yep. And you need physical space to do that. And staff. So when you start laying out plans for HSR terminals you probably should include that. Which also affects trip times. And costs.
They've been running trains in the US for almost 200 years. Why would it suddenly be a problem?
There used to not be metal detectors in airports and you could walk to the plane. You know how big or how many bombs you can get on a passenger train?
But a properly sized and fueled jet can go pretty much anywhere and crash into anything. You hijack a train and you're still stuck on the tracks. A train bombing/hijacking just isn't as photogenic.
Here is an introduction to physics. What if you just explode a bomb on a train and or derail it on the ground. I'd look up the equation for momentum if I were you. How many passengers do you think would survive given what happens in much lower speed incidents. You can't shoot a plane out of the sky unless you have some serious military hardware. Any idiot could blow up HSR lines with an IED. I expect many will also pooh pooh this possibility. But Homeland Security doesn't.
High-speed trains are rather more resistant to (on-board) bombings than planes. Look up the Carlos the Jackal TGV bombings. The train was damaged and people died, but it stayed on the tracks.
If it had been a plane most likely all would have been killed.
Admittedly the possibility of an IED attack on *the tracks* raises a different spectre. But this possibility can be mitigated with good surveillance.
And anything can be a target, anyway. A terrorist attack can very easily be carried out at a cafe or a restaurant for example.
I don't see why this would be any more of an issue than a school or a mall or a concert or a subway.
The reason planes need extra security is that a plane can be used as a weapon to target an even bigger target than any of these, like a skyscraper. But a train can't target anything, so it doesn't need any more security than any other place that has a few hundred people in it at once.
Cuban healthcare. Amtrak expansion plans. Look, I know that Slow Boring subscriptions have slipped a bit, but is it necessary to go so totally clickbait? It's like reading Buzzfeed.
On an episode of the Weeds, Matt mentioned wishing he could spend more time on financial regulation, but nobody would read it.
Now that he has a captive audience, I bet he's chomping at the bit to write about the Volcker rule.
OnlyFans stopped accepting sexual content, so we all signed up here for the infrastructure porn.
How about some reliable internet on Amtrak? That'd be nice. Often I don't even get phone reception, so using the hotspot for internet is unreliable.
I can think of few areas of engineered transport systems more subject to bullshit than HSR. Whatever preconceptions you might have about this mode of transportation can be cured by taking it. And paying attention to what you are seeing. You often see throwaway lines praising the comfort of HSR. There's actually a very good reason for that. Which is that you can't do what airlines have done to increase seating capacity in response to demand. That's because if you did make seats narrower and added seats you would then have to eliminate whole rows of seats to increase luggage capacity. Which, by the way, sucks badly. If you are doing anything beyond a day trip, say going on vacation, you will have luggage. Which is piled in inadequate storage at the front of each car in racks. and you will discover when you try to find yours that someone has rearranged the pile and it isn't where you left it. The knock effects of this are evident to those who have eyeballs.
HSR is reliant on having few stops. Which means it serves fewer and fewer people. There is nothing more deceptive than HSR maps that suggest the connecting lines provide service. They don't. Those are just lines where people can't catch trains and get to watch them go by. And that brings me to the goofiest of HSR conceptions which is that terminals should be located anywhere near city centers. That is just stupid. Not only is that the most expensive place to build a terminal but it never has the room for ancillary facilities like baggage handling or short and long term parking or car rentals that would make it a convenient alternative to driving directly or taking a plane where all those conveniences exist.
It wouldn't matter how fast the trains run on those proposed Amtrak routes presuming you could, at enormous expense, rebuild the right of ways to run HSR. You would have to eliminate almost all Amtrak stops or it wouldn't be HSR. And, btw, if you want to build new dedicated right of ways for HSR you should stop using European costs per kilometer of track laid and add number of over/under passes you need to build per kilometer. Which is much higher in the US than anywhere in Europe except maybe Germany.
“ Which is that you can't do what airlines have done to increase seating capacity in response to demand.”
Can you not add cars?
Within limits you can. Subject to terminal capacity which varies. My point is that you shouldn't have to. It's really not that hard to design a proper baggage handling system with a train that stops at only a few places. Stop length for unloading would be dramatically shortened and turnaround time improved. And you would obviously be able to add more seats in the passenger cars. Sorting baggage on the train is dumb. I don't think Matthew, as part of his Great Boarding Crusade, has given much thought to how rail works outside of the metropolitan areas where he uses them.
I'll assume you managed to ignore all the seniors, or mothers with young children or those with disabilities in your travels. And you don't know any.
I've literally never seen a platform level the train door on Amtrak. Admittedly the vast majority of my trips have been between Detroit and Chicago. Plus a few longer pleasure excursions where I did not give a damn about how long it took. What I have seen is that Amtrak loads passengers into cars based on their destinations. Why is this necessary? Because most of their stops along the Detroit /Chicago route that also provides local transportation needs have very short platforms that are often not even two cars lengths long. Which means everybody getting off there has to be in the same car unless you want to keep shuttling the train forward to allow safe exit. They also have staff to assist people who require it to load baggage, or baby carriages or people with disabilities. Making that easier would be a good place to spend money.
But keep in mind that if you ever want to change an engineering parameter like deck height or platform height or standoff from track gauge you had better get it right. You are stuck with it. The French had to spend about a hundred million bucks to modify their train platforms, thousands of them, because their new wider cars hit the old platforms.
Well if you paid attention to what I said, which you didn't, the standards in dense metropolitan areas are not the same as everywhere else. And it is a mistake to assume they are. I specifically said that. Read more carefully. About those old French train platforms? The authority in France that decided the new cars were fine only checked the platforms built to the latest standard which, at the time, was thirty years old. The thousands of platforms that predated the new standard? They didn't check those and they outnumbered the newer platforms.
You should get out of your NEC bubble. Believe or not there are people out there who can vote.
Yes indeed. It's always an interesting experience informed by forty years experience as an engineer. I cannot help if you are unobservant.
I notice you haven't addressed my observations. Tell me yours. It only took me half a dozen trips to notice the common deficiencies.
That's funny. Because I have noticed the same baggage handling issue every time. I do agree that almost everyone's conception of what rail should be is based exactly on their personal needs. And you very clearly want a system dedicated to your needs where you never need to touch your car. We'll leave aside your observations on China since they are irrelevant to the issues in the US.
My conceptions are based entirely on very pragmatic engineering. If your goal is, for environmental reasons , to displace traffic from air or road travel then you need passengers over a much larger geographical area, suburban or rural who are going to want to get to the terminal. Just as they would an airport. If you want to say that a city centered terminal has the the public transport to reach the terminal I will suggest that works both ways. You can use it to get to a terminal outside the city center. And then that terminal will also be more readily accessible to people with cars over a much larger area. And it will cost much less to build. You would have room for parking and baggage handling just like airports. And dedicated baggage handling with dedicated fast unloading baggage cars. And baggage carousels. And when you discover you need it, baggage inspection.
I have schlepped baggage all over the world and I know what I want. I know where I live. And I know what kind of rail service suits me and many other people. If you want it designed around your particular needs that's fine. I'm not in. It doesn't make sense.
Did you, on your many short commuter trips, notice any level crossings? I'll bet you did. Guess what? You can't have those with high speed rail. Unless you are willing to accept the occasional mass casualty event when some idiot is stopped on the tracks. If you have taken HSR anywhere you will indeed catch glimpses of far off scenery. But mostly you will see protective berms and fencing designed to prevent access to the tracks.
Yes. And if you want to build HSR in the US then that corridor is the place to put it. The idea that all rail money should be devoted to that particular problem while basically ignoring all other rail needs fast or slow is politically ludicrous. It borders on Sunrise Movement obliviousness. I have no problem with some federal level funding for this venture. Many citizens live there. But nothing stops them from proceeding on a state level with undertaking all the extensive engineering it will require. And that is a lot.
Quite a lot of my objections to the more general conception of HSR is based on their Field of Dreams philosophy. If you build it passengers will come. Well that isn't going to happen with a city center to city center design philosophy. Which really only serves the interests of people living in or near a city center.
Yes. In cities that aren't too spread out. But American cities are. The NEC is very interesting. It's where Amtrak almost makes money. The argument in favor of HSR is that it's very high cost will be repaid in higher ridership. My argument is that this idea is very suspect unless it is accompanied by facilities that will draw people from larger geographical areas with different transportation needs. There's an upper limit on the number of people who live in city central locations who's travel habits, car or air, will be displaced by a city central terminal. Most of them will be using public transit anyway. It's the passengers from farther out that you want to add.
If trillions of military spending and Joe Biden’s decades of foreign policy leadership get you the current situation in Afghanistan, $66 billion should just about cover the planning costs of maybe getting up to modern speeds sometime this century.
What about government programs and Amtrak management makes MY think normal budgets are in play? MY is the one who writes about the ruinous costs of public transit construction in the US all the time.
Your supposition doesn’t explain any of the abject public failures in blue cities in blue states. Couldn’t fund public transit adequately because of cost overruns and pension / debt obligations, couldn’t conduct competitive maintenance on public housing. Boondoggles.
Your argument is that if the government publicized (the opposite of privatized) all of parts of public infrastructure, R&D, healthcare, etc. we would have cheaper & better options.
Can you help me understand how the results would be very different from education which remains almost entirely government run, has seen a doubling of gdp allocated to it, and few look at as a rousing success?
To be clear - I think you are correct that the loss of expertise in government functions has made some of these worse, but I don't think that is the panacea either.
The first part makes sense to me. I think that building internal expertise is a critically important part of effective government that is often overlooked.
I'm curious about the second part - stopping the revolving door. I've heard that around lobbying for a while, but never been quite sure how you could stop that effectively.