The fact the US is basically empty means the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high because of the sheer distances involved. You’re talking like 1000 miles, not 200. The places which are closer together, like the East Coast, do have some passenger rail but they’re also much denser, like Europe, and so they have the same kind of constraints (or worse).
The US has a lot of freight rail, and we use it.
The Wild West mentality has gone away in the railroad industry which is now hyper-conservative and regulated.
I do sometimes wish the US lived up to the Wild West stereotype the Europeans imagine. But no, we often have just as much stifling regulation (if not more), depending on where you’re talking about. But we do have gun violence, so there’s that.
The center of population in the US is still just barely to the west of the Mississippi, whenever people point out how vast and largely empty the US is, the leave out that the population itself is actually generally fairly close together for a majority of the country.
You could easily have HSR all over the south, Midwest and NE, and then between population centers on the west coast, just likely not in the desert and western Great Plains.
See for example Alon Levy's map of proposed HSR for the Eastern United States: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/02/10/high-speed-rai... They've actually done serious investigation of what's viable given typical costs and ridership of high-speed lines elsewhere in the world.
The high-speed bits they propose are basically a Boston-Atlanta-Chicago triangle with some ornaments (Chicago - KC, Chicago - Minneapolis, Cleveland - Pittsburgh - Philadelphia, and connections to Toronto, Montreal, Quebec), and separate networks in Florida and Texas. Connecting the Florida and Texas networks to the main one is marginal.
I'm not sure of their opinions on separate networks in the Pacific Northwest and in California, but I'm sure they have looked at it. I do recall them saying that it doesn't make sense to connect, say, Portland to San Francisco - there's just not much in between.
It doesn’t make sense to connect Portland and SF, but there’s a lot of value to be gained in connecting Portland and Vancouver BC, and San Diego to SF/possibly Sacramento.
We would definitely want to have a “constellation” of networks rather than one interconnected system given the geography of the US, and that’s fine. There’s never going to be a time when it makes more sense to travel from LA to NYC by rail instead of flying.
The biggest takeaway is that there is a specific role that HSR can play, but it’s not going to take over all long distance trips. Given where we are starting in the US, however, there is a massive mine of untapped potential.
Right. You don't want a line down the entire West Coast, even though it's tempting to draw. But a line from Vancouver to Portland makes sense, as does a "greater California" system - roughly lines from Los Angeles to SF, Sacramento, Vegas, San Diego. The latter is basically the California HSR system that's under construction, plus the proposed privately built line from LA to Vegas. (Levy also proposes LA to Phoenix; Phoenix is further than Vegas but also bigger, so maybe it makes sense.)
Even in the east there are some gaps. It's obvious that a midwestern network centered on Chicago and a southeastern network centered on Atlanta make sense, but it's a bit more of a stretch to connect those to the northeast.
Why not? The great advantage of high speed rail is that with intermediate stops along the route you can service smaller cities which previously, or as you just did, would be considered flyover country. Thus making the value of the system greater than just the end terminuses.
Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist. Neither would themselves ever be valuable enough for HSR, but as part of a larger system they definitely would bring value.
Especially since you would get 3.5 hour trains Bay Area <-> Seattle and 4.5 hour trains to Vancouver.
That is right at the limit of when flying starts to make more sense from a time perspective.
Edit: Here's a good video on the concept. From a comment (by the author) he says that France and Spain has many lines in the range of 4 given his scoring. It just seems miniscule compared to the enormous potential of DC <-> Boston corridor.
"U.S. High Speed Rail: What's Next? Analyzing Extensions and Expansions, and What Makes Sense"
> Especially since you would get 3.5 hour trains Bay Area <-> Seattle and 4.5 hour trains to Vancouver.
Hiroshima to Tokyo is just over 3.5 hours on the Shinkansen, and it’s a 500 mile trip. SF TO Seattle is roughly 800 miles… You’re making a very optimistic projection.
> Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist.
You’re barely cracking 500k people and covering the most difficult terrain on the entire corridor.
The problem is that TSA isn't as bad as it was right after 9/11, and baggage tracking is much better on all airlines. You no longer need to arrive 2 hours before the scheduled departure and spend an hour collecting your bags.
With TSA PreCheck, I can reliably go from curb to gate in less than 15 minutes. If you're not someone who feels the need to be the first one on the plane, that means you can arrive at the airport 30 minutes before the scheduled departure time.
So, as a practical matter, that means a SJC->SEA flight is at least an hour shorter than the hypothetical train.
I'm also very skeptical that a train could reach Seattle in 3.5 hours from the Bay Area. That would require an average speed of over 200 mph on the great-circle path.
California High-Speed Rail only promises an average speed of 150 mph between LA and San Francisco (w/ a world-class top speed of 220 mph). Additionally, geography dictates a more circuitous route. CAHSR route-miles between LA and the SFBA (similar terrain) are 25% greater than the straight-line distance.
Realistically, the train would take almost 6 hours, and a plane would be less than half.
Yeah, I haven't flown for a while and I gather there's still a certain level of travel chaos. But pre-pandemic, I'd get to the airport early because it's more relaxing for me and my limo company doesn't like to cut things close. But with TSA Pre, I was rarely more than 15 minutes through security and often much faster. Backups happen and I'd rather build in slack for them. But in my experience, at the US airports I fly through, the "security theater" is rarely onerous.
South of Eugene and north of Redding, the land is mountainous and would be extremely difficult to build a straight enough line to serve as HSR. The existing Amtrak Cascades service goes between Eugene and Vancouver BC.
I agree, a high speed line between Eugene and Redding seems like an overkill. However a traditional electrified railway with a stop in Medford would be pretty sweat.
With the planned California High Speed rail going between Sacramento and Los Angeles, and the proposed Cascadia high speed rail going all the way to Eugene, this traditional link would enable a sleeper train between Seattle and Los Angeles in something like 10-13 hours. That is way better then today’s Coastal Starlight which makes the trip in 36 hours.
There really isn't much between Portland area and San Francisco area, and there isn't enough potential economic activity that an HSR would induce (it is too mountainous, which also means building HSR would be more expensive).
Because not enough people live along the way. Sure you an build track and run trains, but 5 hours on a train is about the time where flying is enough faster that people will fly instead of taking the train. Less than 5 hours train competes well (stations are closer to you, and no long security lines), but after that airplanes are enough faster that few people would use a train. That means only a small number of people will ride the train for those middle stations.
Sure if you are building a track you can put in stations in towns that don't generation much traffic, but you still need traffic from somewhere and it won't come.
Well with Maglev, Portland to San Francisco could make sense via Sacramento. You wouldn’t want to do it on the coast because of the mountains, and there’s at least Redding and Ashland and a couple of other places in-between.
At 500 km/h (310 mph) you could feasibly do Sacramento to Portland in under two hours. The less straightforward question is how much of the metro area do you serve around those two cities, and do you connect that line directly to San Francisco or do you run a separate line to Sacramento via the Delta? Do you go a sort if L-shape around Stockton first? The politics of this could push travel time up, but at 500 km/h you can cover a lot of ground, much of it fairly empty.
So a hypothetical Best Coast system would connect Vancouver, BC to Portland, Portland to Sacramento, Sacramento to Reno, Reno to Las Vegas, Sacramento to LA, San Francisco to Sacramento via Stockton, San Francisco to LA, LA to Tijuana via San Diego, LA to Las Vegas, LA to El Paso via Phoenix, Phoenix to St. George, Las Vegas to Salt Lake City via St. George, San Diego to El Paso via Tucson & Mexicali and now you’re in Texas where options include El Paso to New Orleans via either Austin & Houston or San Antonio & Houston, Brownsville to McAllen, Brownsville to Houston via Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi to San Antonio, Houston to Dallas, Dallas to Oklahoma City and I’m probably missing some, but you have the workings of a Gulf Coast constellation anchored by Texas on one end and Florida on the other.
Thing is, I’ve worked this all out on paper too, including a Northeast, Southeast and Midwest map that looked much like one that someone linked to up the thread. Problem is, our choice of infrastructure is downstream from our cultural preferences which in turn are shaped by the infrastructure our ancestors built in the decades prior.
El Paso is about 725 miles away from San Diego according to Siri, so with the best trains in the world you could be inside the Texas rail constellation I briefly outlined above in about 2-3 hours which in turn could serve as the basis for a Gulf Coast constellation connecting Florida and the Southeast connecting to the Midwest and the Northeast and then to Canada.
It’s not built though because people just fly instead. We worked out how to get cheap air travel long before we figured out super-fast transcontinental rail travel that probably doesn’t make sense coast to coast but if it already existed, probably would make sense going coast to middle and middle to middle and would just happen to connect the coasts. Or you could just fly, which is what we do, and since that already exists and is even faster than rail travel, metro areas can figure out how their own inter-urban rail systems that are slow and local where it makes sense to build them and just try to make sure the airport is connected too. I like trains, but not so much that I’m willing to toss hundreds of billions of public money into some kind of “national rail system” whatever form it took for whatever prestige it might bring. Jumbo jets are cool too.
Wind resistance at ground level means that an airplane is much more energy efficient at those distances and speed. As such those distances are unlike to work just because an airplane is so much cheaper even if because of speed it is time competitive.
Here's a good video on one method of calculating what the sum of the smaller individual parts would be. This is for the north east corridor but the same thinking applies to any rail project.
It seems like about a million people live there, not nearly enough individually, and trains would likely alternate at which locations they stop to bring the total travel time between the larger areas down.
Might be hindered by the mountainous terrain though making the cost prohibitive.
"U.S. High Speed Rail: What's Next? Analyzing Extensions and Expansions, and What Makes Sense"
They did the math and decided to connect Florida to the main Eastern component (based on there being enough demand for Atlanta-Florida travel), so there are four components - the main Eastern component, Texas, California (+Vegas, Phoenix), Pacific Northwest (Portland to Vancouver)
I don't think you can take any national plan seriously if it doesn't include Chicago/Memphis/Jackson/New Orleans. Passenger rail service has been in almost continuous operation on that route since a little after the Civil War. It has to be there for the symbolism alone.
Levy addresses this, and agrees with you: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rai... Basically, Amtrak started out with the existing rail network, which is going
to be oriented to early-20th-century population centers, and so New Orleans is well-served by Amtrak standards. But a modern network in the South would be oriented more towards those parts of the South that have grown - Texas and the Piedmont - and less towards New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis.
American growth of the last 80 years is incompatible with the future of the world. You won't save a sprawly mess by putting a high speed rail station in the center of it.
If it was an important city before the age of the automobile, it has a chance. Put the "future" rail network in the cities that have a future.
Point number two, and probably even more important than the first, is the fact that you have to get your plan through a million committees, and through Congress, etc. You need support. His plan won't get it. Too much of it goes through places that hate trains and "socialism". And then it tells the people that have nostalgic memories of a railroad that lifted their family out of the Jim Crow south to go pound sand. His plan will never go further than his blog :)
Would you like an analogy to this situation?
Everybody in tech has incredible ideas for the future. But the startup world is littered with companies that have had no success at all getting from point A to point B despite billions in VC money.
Yes. It's an area with AT BEST stagnant growth, and likely contraction, versus areas like the Triangle in NC that are poorly served by rail and rapidly growing.
The entire Great Lakes region is decently densely populated.
- Columbus - Cleveland 142 miles
- Columbus - Cincinnati 106 miles
- Cleveland - Pittsburgh 134 miles
- Cleveland - Toledo 114 miles
- Columbus - Toledo 142 miles
- Toledo - Detroit 58 miles (Cleveland, Columbus, & Cincinnati can share this)
- Toledo - Chicago 244 miles (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, & Detroit can share this)
Theoretically, you can connect Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, & Pittsburgh into <3 hr trips by HSR.
That's going to beat flying. And that connects about:
- Chicago 9.5M
- Detroit 4.5M
- Pittsburgh 2.3M
- Cincinatti 2.3M
- Columbus 2.2M
- Cleveland 2.1M
- TOTAL = 23M+ people (~7% of the US)
For 940 miles of rail...
Even considering that HSR costs ~$100M per mile - that's about $4k per person.
That sounds like a lot. But since we have frequent opportunities to finance 30-year treasuries at ~1.5% interest and the Fed mandates inflation to be ~2% or higher:
=PMT(-0.005/12, 30*12, -4000)
That's about ~$10.30 per month per person. Considering the average tax payer is paying ~$1,300 per month in federal taxes - 0.7% of that going to HSR where it makes sense - does not seem like a terrible idea...
For context, highways cost about ~$200B per year - which comes down to ~$49.75 per tax payer per month - however, only about 1/4th of that is Federal taxes (~$12.43).
I'll also add that the Great Lakes is probably at the bottom of the list of regions where HSR would make sense. Other places like the Northeast make much more sense.
Maybe I am misunderstanding some of the intent. But yes, a rail from NYC to Miami is far, but when you chunk it up, it makes sense. For a NYC-Miami, you could have stops in Philadelphia, DC/Baltimore, Richmond, Raleigh/Durham, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Orlando. It would really depend on the route. Like a NYC-Portland OR or Seattle, you can make some pretty good stops from NYC to Chicago, but once you get past Chicago, there probably is any really good population centers for stops there between Chicago and Portland/Seattle. So in some areas, those distances can be justified, but for sure we have some that can't be easily justified.
The thing about NYC-Miami is that north of DC the population is along the coast but south of it the population is inland. A route via Charlotte and Atlanta probably pencils out better than one via Charleston and Savannah.
Yea it does. If your gonna make a stop in North Carolina/South Carolina, Charlotte would be a good spot because it would have some good access to then change transportation and go to Charleston or Raleigh or Greensboro. Didn't consider Atlanta though since that would be a lease direct route to Miami. You have to go back East to hit something like Jacksonville or Orlando. But the trade off is, Atlanta is probably a more wanted destination than Savannah. Or pehaps something like Augusta where you don't have to go as far West, but your still not too terribly far from Atlanta.
Sadly our 1000 mile trips currently take ~24 hours rather than the 5-6 that it could. Multiple factors for that: slow trains; long stops; cargo rail gets priority over passenger rail.
Even the fastest trains Amtrak offers ("Acela") are zoned - or permitted, not sure what the right term is here - up to 150 MPH, and only on specific portions of the route.
The sense is that the Northeast corridor has too many curves and roadbed issues to be able to go faster.
There would have to be constructed a new corridor, not in the same path as existing railroad rights of way, for not a small amount of money, and going through expensive real estate.
The political will for that is not in existence, so far.
And the fact is that while taking a train the full length of the Northeast Corridor takes too long to be practical most of the time, NYC to points north and NYC to points south works pretty well (i.e. is competitive with flying) with existing trains.
Easy to complain on the internet. Hard to change a hard left into a sweeping arc in the middle of New Haven.
Even ignoring the money, if you try and do a project like that you are going to get slapped in the face by all the same "cutting apart muh neighborhood" rhetoric that gets used against highways. Grade separation and "just paying those people to go away" are both expensive enough to be non-starters.
Highways and rail create different kinds of disruption in neighborhoods. Highways constantly have traffic, creating noise and pollution all the time. Railroads are mostly quiet, with loud traffic in short bursts.
Passenger railroads are narrower than urban highways. The US-101 freeway cuts through Echo Park and Westlake in Los Angeles, taking up as much as 330 feet of width, counting on/off ramps. California HSR has trench sections specced as narrow as 72 feet[1], and most of its urban rights-of-way are under 100 feet wide.
Walking next to the 101 in Echo Park you can see how it so starkly divides what was once a single connected neighborhood. The light rail lines (about ~40-50 ft to cross) in other neighborhoods don't give that impression.
I have no love for highway pits but to play if off like an HSR pit is some quaint little light rail is simply farcical.
You're being dishonest or ignorant. The fact that you compare max-width of one to min-width of the other rules out one option. A pit is a pit. You're limited to crossing at a few specific points no matter how narrow it is and traveling to those points accounts for the bulk of the distance covered. The physical width only matters if you're evaluating the neighborhood for visual appeal and not actual livability. "Quiet most of the time" doesn't really count for much because people acclimate to the background noise levels and that one train per hour is just as jarring as that one motorcycle with the insane exhaust per hour. At least with subways and airports it's every couple minutes so you get more used to it.
High speed rail is like having a jet plane go by,
given the intent to run at,
say 150 to 200 miles per hour,
and has its own troublesome neighbor issues.
It is 32 hours if driving 130-150 kph on the freeway (80-90 mph) without stopping for food, bathrooms, gas, or sleep. It's probably a few hundred hours with the train since you will have to go a few hundred or a few thousand kilometers north first.
Interestingly, there is a long train line from Louisiana to Los Angeles called the Sunset Limited. Up until Hurricane Katrina in 2005 it ran between Orlando Florida and Los Angeles,
On Amtrak, that's a 102 hour trip that takes you through Chicago and DC. Not an exaggeration. Given usual delays, that 102h is wildly optimistic. Coach seats: $387.
We're not talking about doing NYC - SF by train, but there are a lot of places where it makes sense.
As I used to live in the Bay Area, it really surprised me that there was no bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Yes, apparently it's planned but it boggles my mind that they waited so much before building it.
Americans don't realize how much nicer train is compared to plane for medium distances (up to 500 miles). Station being in the middle of the city, get in the train 10 minutes before departure without check-in or security, no waiting 15 minutes on the tarmac before disembarking... I guarantee you the door-to-door time is going to be lower.
Also train is more confortable, seats are wider, you can use phones/electronics for the full duration of the trip...
> Yes, apparently it's planned but it boggles my mind that they waited so much before building it.
Basically because there are only 2-3 places you can practically cross the mountains surrounding LA (Tehachapi Tejon, and the coast), and 3-4 places you can do the same for the SFBA. All of them are already occupied by existing rail or roads.
Those mountain crossings cost more that the rest of the system combined.
> get in the train 10 minutes before departure without check-in or security, no waiting 15 minutes on the tarmac before disembarking... I guarantee you the door-to-door time is going to be lower.
I wish, but you're wrong and it's not even close. (SFO, OAK or SJC) to (LAX, BUR, LGB or ONT) is about 45 minutes gate to gate. Add 5 minutes for security[], 25 minutes boarding, 15 minutes deplaning and you're at 1h30 curb to curb (vs. the almost 3 hours station to station that CAHSR claims* they will provide when finished).
The plane is faster even accounting for travel time to and from the station or airport. The contrast is especially stark if your destination is not downtown LA.
[*] TSA with PreCheck has gotten really fast in the past couple years. They no longer scan your boarding pass (just your ID + a database of the day's travelers). You don't need to unpack your bag, remove your shoes, nor remove your jacket. On a dozen trips in the past year, security has never taken me more than 5 minutes. It takes almost as long to walk through the maze of ropes forming the queue as the actual security procedure itself.
The biggest break for trains in the last 20 years hasn't been Maglevs or Japan's bullet. Matter of fact it has been OBL fixation on attacking America in a spectacular and televised fashion.
The lack of security abord trains is shocking honestly. Trains are special, there is something about them which calms people even the most evil, because ill intentioned people like terrorists and mentally deranged domestic shooters just ignore them.
I don't know why this is down-voted so, but to me also outside the US it seems correct? You bill for travel between stations, there'd be a lot more track & travel between stations in the US, on average, if it were as ubiquitous.
Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.
>>Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.
That is the problem in my opinion - I prefer sitting on a train, to sitting on a plane, but for most routes I need to travel (within the US) it takes longer to get there and is more expensive than flying - why would anyone want to pay more and waste more time? You either need to be faster or cheaper if you want my business.
The more rail improves the more I'm tempted to take it, with flying you have the additional time cost of just dealing with the airports, turn up an hour early, then get put in the metal tube where they won't serve you drink till they're up in the air, and you can't bring your own.
A train may take longer sometimes, but I find the whole thing much less stressful, you're not strapped to the seat, you have leg room, even a table, power sockets, bring your own food and drink, and the prices are competitive.
It still takes longer than I'd like to get from Switzerland to the UK, and that's mostly due to a lengthy change in Paris.
I think in France, and prob other countries too, their moving to ban domestic flights that can be done on rail instead
It's hard to overstate how different the European rail experience is from the American experience. SF<->LA is a 50m, $50 flight. It's approx. 9h and $400 by rail. In practice, the last time I attempted that route it took 15h because the train had issues halfway and none of the assigned seats had power or legroom.
Even the Seattle to Portland route, probably the best on the west coast, has issues. A flight takes about 50 mins and can be had for about $60. Alaska Airlines runs flights at least once an hour all day long. From 6am until midnight.
The train takes 3.5 hours (often closer to 4 and I've had it take more than 5 just because of freight priority). The train makes 4 trips a day (one being a longer route that is usually delayed) and the timing means that any business trip will probably require an overnight stay. The train is only $27 though because both states (especially WA) heavily subsidize the route.
In the end, it really comes down to where in the metro areas your trip begins and ends as to which works out best. For us, the train station saves about an hour of ground transport time compared to the airports and we can arrive much closer to departure, so the train works best. For plenty of others, the airport will be faster and probably easier logistically.
I don't really have a preference, but having done my first couple flights in close to 20 years in the past 3 months, I was struck by how much has changed in that time.
PreCheck and Global Entry weren't around when we went to Bermuda in August 2001. It was a trip notable not only for its proximity to 9/11 - by chance, my bag was searched either before we left L.F Wade in St. George's or on arrival back in Newark, but this happened without my knowledge and I only found out about it because customs had repacked it included a note informing me of this fact inside. - and also because a trip to camp the previous week was the start of an ear infection which burst my ear drum on the plane going down.
Fun times.
However, I quite like the idea of passport control on a train happening before you embark on the departing leg of a trip. With those formalities out of the way, just collect your bags at the destination and you're free to go.
I don't know if the FAA or TSA would consider this too burdensome to implement, but it's an idea.
They've been trying to implement passport control before boarding the train between NYC and Montreal for a while, but nothing seems to have come of it. It was an Obama-era priority.
I haven't taken that train in many years, but they basically stop the train at the border and immigration agents board and check everyone's passport. It's scheduled to take 2 hours. Really stupid. It's a 45 minute flight, and you go through US immigration in Canada before boarding the flight.
That's crazy. Perhaps a good comparison is the channel tunnel, e.g. going from London to Paris you go through security similar (a bit less onerous) to that at an airport before boarding.
That was the case even with the UK in the EU (maybe it's not any less onerous than an airport now actually, idk) but otherwise intra-EU over land is not an issue, almost necessarily. (But then, you might think that about Canada/US.)
There are some disadvantages, such as not being able to pickup anymore passengers until crossing the border. Probably a non-issue with Vancouver close to the border.
What about that piece of the US that's isolated from the rest, quite close to Vancouver I think, Fort something attached to the South of BC, accessible only through it. Do you have to go through something like that twice, or can you go between it and the main body of the US more easily (without stops perhaps)?
Or (facepalm, more obviously) Alaska for that matter?
A school bus runs from there to mainland USA and I suspect there’s an informal agreement to drive without stopping through Canada so they don’t have to bother too excessively with clearances.
> However, I quite like the idea of passport control on a train happening before you embark on the departing leg of a trip. With those formalities out of the way, just collect your bags at the destination and you're free to go.
It's better than that. Space on board is at less of a premium so train carriages can be made with plenty of room for luggage alongside passengers. No need to check baggage.
Nobody's asking for an express train between Jackson and Billings. When you exclude the Mountain States and Alaska, the US has about the same population density as Western Europe.
There's no good reason for us to have zero public transit options between Atlanta and Savannah, Madison and Milwaukee, Columbus and Cincinatti, Denver and Colorado Springs, or Mobile and New Orleans.
Quick sanity check here, because I've seen this claim and never bothered to check.
Let's say Western Europe = Germany, Austria, Italy, and everything west of them, i. e. Benelux, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain (= UK - Northern Ireland). (I'm including the UK and excluding Ireland because there are rail connecctions from Britain to the mainland but not from Ireland to Britain. I'm excluding Denmark because isn't that really Scandinavia?)
Total population: Germany = 84m, France = 68m, Britain = 66m, Italy = 59m, Spain = 47m, Netherlands = 18m, Belgium = 12m, Portugal = 10m, Austria = 9m, Switzerland = 9m, Luxembourg = 1m. Total is 383m.
Total area, in km^2: Germany = 358k, France = 551k, Britain = 228k, Italy = 301k, Spain = 499k, Netherlands = 41k, Belgium = 31k, Portugal = 88k, Austria = 84k, Switzerland = 41k, Luxembourg = 3k. Total is 2225k.
So the population density of western Europe is about 172/km^2 or 445/mi^2.
The only states this dense are DC, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware; New York and Florida are just under the cutoff.
If I've done the math right, DC + NJ + RI + MA + CT + MD + DE + NY + PA + OH (74m people/429k km^2) is the largest contiguous bunch of states which is over 172 people/km^2.
If we take the east to be everything east of the Mississippi, I get 190m people in 2.301m km^2, or 82 people/km^2. If we add in CA + OR + WA that actually drags down the density a bit.
So the densely populated bits of the Northeast/mid-Atlantic are as densely populated as Western Europe. But the eastern US as a whole isn't.
I agree that those pairs of cities you mentioned should have better connections between them though.
>There's no good reason for us to have zero public transit options between Atlanta and Savannah, Madison and Milwaukee, Columbus and Cincinatti, Denver and Colorado Springs, or Mobile and New Orleans.
Does regular bus service not count? Sure they're not publicly owned but does that result in any meaningful differences to the users?
Most of the US is nowhere close to as densely populated as Western Europe, even excluding Alaska and the mountain states. You can't just look at the land area and population and make a naive calculation of density.
Western Europe's population density gradient is much sharper than most of the US. Only the coastal corridor of the Northeast US really comes close. The gradient of the populations is important because it tells you how many people are within a usable range of the train stations.
Even if you've got a high speed line between Madison and Milwaukee what in the hell are you going to do once you step off the train? Neither city has impressive public transit and both are very spread out. A high speed link might save a boring drive between those cities but that savings would get eaten up by the intra-city travel.
One reason is that, once you arrive, options for public transport within the destination city in the US are limited. So you need a car once you get to your destination anyhow. What do you do when you step off the train in Atlanta or Savannah?
I just spent 7 weeks traveling around Europe by train. I would not have considered that approach without the extensive local public transportation systems. Atlanta is not remotely in the same league as Berlin in terms of public transit.
I’ve never been to the state of Georgia, but I was under the impression that both Atlanta and Savannah had pretty good public transit systems. Atlanta has a metro system (MARTA) which is the eight largest in the USA by ridership. And Savannah has an extensive bus network, and a walkable downtown area where transit is actually free to ride.
I agree that we should let density and demand drive construction of HSR.
That being said, there are plenty of plausible HSR routes in the US. We're a very sparsely populated country in our middle, but there's effectively a "string" of large cities right through our middle: NYC - Pittsburgh - Columbus - {Cincinnati, Indianapolis} - {Louisville, St. Louis} - Kansas City - Oklahoma City - Albuquerque - {Phoenix, Tucson} - Los Angeles.
All of the legs there should under 400 miles, and most should be under 200. There's also plenty of room for adjustment: Louisville - Nashville - Memphis - Dallas and then onward south, for example.
> the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high
The cost is high, but more painfully, the cost per-mile is higher than for the same distance of railroad in Europe or East Asia. That's not a result of pure geography.
Also, while the cost is high, it's not actually that large in comparison to the overall DoT budget, which is projected at $142B for FY2023. You could build a lot of train for that. Political will is a much more important factor. We just dropped $40B on the Current War without blinking.
Even so, this misses another key step: intercity rail in Europe usually connects seamlessly to metro rail, which is what makes it so easy and nice to use. But the cities themselves in the United States do not usually have rail systems to connect to. That's why the best near-term rail corridor IMHO is NY-Buffalo (subway) - Youngstown (possible Pittsburgh metro extension) - Cleveland (subway) - Toledo (possible Detroit metro extension) - Chicago, connecting to six subway systems.
Toledo directly to Chicago doesn't make a lot of sense. Most of the track would go through Indiana, which is at best indifferent to Amtrak.
Consider instead putting Detroit in between the two. The Chicago-Detroit route already operates at 110 mph, Amtrak and the Michigan Dept of Transportation already own the majority of the track and give routing priority to passenger trains. Amtrak and VIA are already talking about a Chicago-Toronto train that doesn't require passengers to disembark for immigration/customs, and their systems are already connected via a rail tunnel under the Detroit River.
Oh, yeah, that sounds pretty good. My main point is that you want to connect the long train to short trains.
In theory, if Raleigh and Richmond (both very "blue" cities and maybe open to it) built LRT systems, you could get another route in DC-Richmond-Raleigh-Charlotte-Atlanta, where the other three have existing intracity rail.
> the cost per-mile is higher than for the same distance of railroad in Europe
how does this make any sence, we have to deal with tonneling under or demolishing existing densely populated real estate along the route, literal mountains in the way, etc.
HS2 in UK caused an outrage, someone's farm was cut in half, houses had to be demolished, etc
I see no mention of 737’s and A320’s here or in most posts. Compare the price per mile with those of alternatives. The U.S. doesn’t even resemble Europe.
The Midwest cluster of cities which include Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St Louis, Columbus, and Detroit, have an extremely similar density and distance distribution compared to France, where high speed rail is incredibly successful. We could have successful high speed rail nearly everywhere in the US with a possible exception of the rocky mountain regions. I wish this density trope would die.
The real reason we don't have high speed rail is that right of way acquisition is ridiculously costly unless government is involved, and we don't trust our government to do it right. Probably justified, if urban rail costs are indicative.
You'd only want to build regional HSR systems that would connect cities that get a lot of traffic and flights between them and are under 300 miles / 500 km apart. So, the northeast corridor, connect California major cities, connect Portland to Seattle, connect Dallas/Austin/Houston/San Antonio.
In Canada, half the population lives near a nearly straight line from Quebec City to Windsor; you could put a high speed rail line down the middle of that.
The US has a lot of freight rail, and we use it.
The Wild West mentality has gone away in the railroad industry which is now hyper-conservative and regulated.
I do sometimes wish the US lived up to the Wild West stereotype the Europeans imagine. But no, we often have just as much stifling regulation (if not more), depending on where you’re talking about. But we do have gun violence, so there’s that.