Yes please! It can't come soon enough

It has been shown that it can be done in the Pacific Northwest.

Perfect. Highspeed rail for travel between cities, and Personal Rapid Transit for travel within cities.

The first modern PRT network is completed at Heathrow, the next one is going up in Abu Dhabi. I can see it taking off in California as well for obvious reasons.

>>89172

that shit will never work

I'm confused. Is he proposing to build real high speed rail with new, limited access rail lines? Acela is pig disgusting. Also, everything except the Northeast corridor is just to sell it to midwestern congressmen.

>>89172

The only place in the US with PRT so far is a network that links the University of West Virginia with the rest of Morgantown. It's...weird.

PRT combines the investment costs of tramways with the capacity of cars.

Now you may imagine a PRT unit complete with a homeless drunkard, vomits, beer cans, used condoms and syringes.

and rapid transit/comuter rail at the locations the train stops at? Not much good if you have to drive or catch a bus when you arrive at your destination

PRT is what happens when you try to apply to public transport the creepy ideology that some put into cars

>>89195
Problem with Acela is there's no place to put new tracks on the East Coast without Big Dig levels of fail.

Western states don't have that problem, they just wouldn't use trains if you paid them. When the new Sprinter line in Oceanside opened, the paper was full of people bitching that they should have built a new freeway instead of wasting money on transit.

Shit would be cash, but I'm not optimistic.

do want

>>89240
You know what? Railroad Right of Way. If the law can't guarantee reasonable rail corridors, it should be made to do so. Also, really recommended for city planning to designate potential rail corridors in advance, so that natural city refurbishment can take that into account.

Your building is on the ideal right of way? Too bad.

I thought California was the only one working on high speed rail, then suddenly everyone has a project!

>>89252
Gee COMRADE, that sounds great. While we're at it, let's outlaw cars entirely so people *have* to ride the train. There you go, profitable passenger rail. Fuck property rights, I can run people's lives better than they can.

>>89255
They practically did the same shit when they were building the interstates.

>>89201
Been on those. Shit is pretty cash.

>>89255
absurd extreme. snarky comment devoid of value.

but, if we did have a national train network where every point on the map could be within five blocks of a station, why not outlaw cars? this is not what the President is doing, but it's a start for a safer and more efficient way of traveling. you're not sacrificing anything here. typical backwards behavior to play the victim and expect selfish, self-righteousness to take priority over a better system. because as soon as you misidentify it as socialist bunk, you recoil reflexively and fight to return to the good ol' days. grow up and look to the damn future you, upside-down fuddy-duddy

fuck you.

>>89255
>While we're at it, let's outlaw cars entirely so people *have* to ride the train. There you go, profitable passenger rail. Fuck property rights, I can run people's lives better than they can.

Thats not nearly as worse as the automotive industry buying up tram companies and shutting them down, forcing people into cars or buses.
Or how about Eisenhowers freeways and suburbanization of America, moving passengers and freight off rail and onto roads.
lrn2history

>>89252
We have plenty of rights of way, they're just all being used by commuter trains and freight lines.

to free up space for the highspeed rail, the interfering portions of the commuter rail/rapid transit could be put in cut and cover subways http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel#Cut-and-cover or see a return of the elevated rail just like Londons Dockland Lightrail and Bangkoks Skytrain
As for demolishing any buildings, well the occupants could be provided new residency in the subsequent redevelopment of the urban area

>>89260
Seconded. Rode them too while I lived in Morgantown, they're great and most wvu students depend on them (when they break down most classes are cancelled I hear)

its the department of transports 2001 proposed coridors :\
and at 150mph its still just the Acelas 240kmh (I'm guessing they'll be using Acelas on these) so thats barely highspeed rail

>>89271
Better than what we have now

Also wtf why is jacksonville and orlando not connected there??!

that strip on i-95/i-4 is terrible. Leave it for the bikers and get the rest of us on some delicious hsr

>>89273
or why isn't the 'Chicago Hub' connected to the East Coast

>Streamliners in the US were significantly set back by a 1940s FRA rule which required enhanced safety features for all trains traveling above a 79mph limit. Since the infrastructure required for cab signaling, automatic train stop and other enhancements was uneconomical in the sparsely-populated American West, this rule effectively killed further development of high speed rail outside of the Northeast, where the Pennsylvania Railroad and others had installed cab signaling beginning in the 1930s. No other English-speaking country adopted this rule, and while the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia all operate trains at 100mph (160 km/h) or higher using conventional lineside signaling, few trains in the United States operate above 79 miles per hour (127 km/h) outside of the Northeast Corridor.
Another one of the effort to kill rail in the US?

>>89273

AGREED. FTW! Get us some delicious HSR too!

>>89275
I think in Australia only the V/Locity connecting country-regional Victoria with Melbourne is capable of 160km/h

>>89273
Acelas averge though is just 86 mph or 138 kmh average

>>89252
It's a little late for a city that's been on a cretain spot for a few hundred years to suddenly accommodate a new plan. Especially when building an "ideal" plan would probably involve things like knocking down every building in a one block path across Manhattan.

>>89261
>if we did have a national train network where every point on the map could be within five blocks of a station

Even Spain's AVE has realistic limits, not this. Their goal is to have HSR stations within 30 miles of 90% of the population. It can be done in the Northeast and upper Midwest, which is as dense as Spain and France. It can't be done in the Rockies.

>>89286
>It's a little late for a city that's been on a cretain spot for a few hundred years to suddenly accommodate a new plan.
Are you some kind of moron? Subway. Elevated.

Speaking as a VA fag, we'd love the NE corridor to come down to hampton roads and richmond. I always take the train from hampton roads to DC right now, and it's a 7 hour ordeal...Car is about 3.5 - 4 hours depending on traffic and other shit.

>>89270
The way I understand it they're actually down fairly frequently now and the WVU Student Handbook suggests that students don't use them if they need to be right on time.

But for having been built in the 1970s, with no significant upgrades (at least not that I know of) it's still pretty surprising that they're only know running into moderate problems.

>>89290
Eh, motown doesn't have enough parking, everyone will use them anyway. It really is the best way to get to the academic buildings (the roads in morgantown, my god, the streets have 180 degree uphill turns in them and such. Madness.)

>>89290
Melbournes W class trams built in the 1940s still operate with no problem

>>89288

No way. I don't want a bunch of hicks walking around NY gawking at our tall buildings and indoor plumbing and such.

>>89287
Horrendous fucking eyesore. See examples: Chicago, and Brooklyn

>>89304

>>89195
>>pig disgusting

It is not. It is a speedy train that gets stuck in a line crowded full of slower trains! Yes, we do need dedicated shinkansen lines, but Acela's not pig disgusting.

>>89300

too late, you already have everybody else coming in and doing the same thing, including people who actually have tall buildings and indoor plumbing.

>>89286
>>It's a little late for a city that's been on a cretain spot for a few hundred years to suddenly accommodate a new plan. Especially when building an "ideal" plan would probably involve things like knocking down every building in a one block path across Manhattan.

Didn't Robert Moses fail at that? (He was trying to build elevated highways, but it met the same conclusion.)

>>89306

bad >>89318 versus good >>89306

>>89320
Euro vs. American.

>>89293
If you ask me they're still much better than most of the other roads in the state,

>>89322
Bangkok is in Europe?

Singapore

There's nowhere to put down the tracks, no one would use it anyways if they've got planes, if the government doesn't subsidize most or all of the cost (which would be HUGE) it would probably be more expensive to buy a ticket than both driving and flying combined, and high speed rail tracks would be a major league terrorist target.

Oh and even if it was approved and started on today you probably wouldn't see it within your lifetime. The California High Speed Rail line by itself is going to take over 10 years to finish, that is if it doesn't bankrupt the government first.

>>89513
- Right of way. Public infrastructure is legally higher priority than private premises.
- Airports aren't cheap to keep. Planes aren't cheap to fly. Their only virtue is they are already built and the running subsidies are set up.
- Tickets may or may not be competitively priced. The operating costs only decrease compared to other means of transport over time, decoupled from fluctuating oil prices.
- It's not worth the effort to terrorize trains. You can't fly a train to a skyscraper, and rail bridges are just as easy to blow up as freeway bridges. If the train itself is bombed, each car needs to be set up separately without anyone noticing. Hostages are likewise hard to maintain since the machine is on ground and there's lots of doors in lots of compartments. Trains are rather hard to derail catastrophically these days.

>>89526

>hurr durr right of way
Public infrastructure is meant to serve the people, and people would not necessarily be well served by building a railroad over what could very well be billions of dollars in property in some areas.

>Airports aren't cheap to keep
PROTIP: Neither are railroads. In terms of economic cost, rail systems are on average only slightly less expensive to maintain than air travel networks, with rail being more efficient as travel distance lessens and vice versa. (Note that rail is forced to compete with road networks in this regard) While there is an argument to be made in that airports are becoming extremely congested and many airspaces (most notably those over New York and Denver) are reaching their safe limits for plane traffic, one could also make an argument that by simply reactivating old freight lines and renovating their bottlenecks would work much better than building completely new rail lines.

>The operating costs only decrease compared to other means of transport over time, decoupled from fluctuating oil prices.
How so? Just because high speed rail would probably make use of overhead power lines doesn't mean that electricity wouldn't come from oil. Remember the United States doesn't have nuclear power capacity on scale with that of France.

what are we even arguing about in this thread, everyone's just changing the topic so that they can keep words coming out of their mouth

centipede unrelated

>>89529
Only about 2% of our electricity comes from petroleum. It's mostly coal and natural gas, which are somewhat insulated from the oil market.

>>89537

Not to mention the push to alternative sources such as wind turbines and geothermal.

>>89529
Old freight lines are useful for municipal trains, not HST. Freight is designed to be slow, because slow is efficient. Slow is fine for local trains because most of the time is spent accelerating and decelerating.

While a train line will reduce land value where the rail lies between stations, the benefit in those around the stations easily makes up for it. A normal local train connection tends to tune up land values around the station to be comparable to the nearest city centre. A HST connection is unlikely to be worse, especially coupled with a slow collector train.

>>89513
>baw baw baw
>>89519
it took centuries in Europe and Asia didn't it

>Public infrastructure is meant to serve the people, and people would not necessarily be well served by building a railroad over what could very well be billions of dollars in property in some areas.

You can make that argument with anything built in public money, that it deprives the private sector of the property that it's built on and doesn't provide a useful service. That's not an easy case to make when every country with an HST system is doing nothing but expanding it as quickly as they can. Even if the monetary cost is scary-looking, it only gets worse the longer we wait and development piles on top of development, until it's priced out of what the government can afford at all.

GG1 unrelated.

>>89513
>This message is brought to you by National City Lines, alternatives in public transport since 1938

>>89275
so can anyone explain the FRA regulations that are out of step with the rest of the world?

>>89529
regarding your rightwing BS: http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/

>>89592

going off-topic for a second, streetcars were on their way out whether GM intervened or not - busses really do make more sense for 90% of what streetcars did, and most were already gone by 1938. GM decided to hop on the boat at the last minute and speed things along, but they didn't cause anything that wasn't going to happen anyway.

>>89529
>How so? Just because high speed rail would probably make use of overhead power lines doesn't mean that electricity wouldn't come from oil. Remember the United States doesn't have nuclear power capacity on scale with that of France.
http://strickland.ca/efficiency.html

>>89597
explain why they're still around in much of the non-English speaking world, Melbourne Australia and making a come back at a snails pace in the USA.
They were done-in in America and else where by an industry conspiracy and government complicty through laws favouring car travel.

>>89597
superior to bus

>>89597
It is not because streetcars are intrinsically worse than buses, it was because the streetcars were old and short-sighted authorities figured it'd be much cheaper to run new buses instead of renovating the old stuff, including rails. It's not necessarily cheaper to run buses infrastructure wise, either, roads with frequent heavy vehicles such as buses need more maintenance than ones with just light vehicles. Maintained streetcars stay useful for decades at a time unlike buses which look and feel dated in just a couple decades at best.

> streetcars were on their way out whether GM intervened or not - busses really do make more sense for 90% of what streetcars did, and most were already gone by 1938. GM decided to hop on the boat at the last minute and speed things along, but they didn't cause anything that wasn't going to happen anyway.

Ever been to Toronto?

Californias highspeed rail is being grade seperated at a number of locations by being put in a cutting, theres no reason they cant do this (or alternatively elevate it) in the NEC for the highspeed rail, commuter rail or freight. True it will cause temporary delays but so does any maintenance works and consider what you get in return.
What was the solution to the problem with Europe and Asias more substantial networks?

>>89657

Kick people off the land and tell them to fuck off.

>>89594
Your link proves that it won't work in America.

>Of course, the crucial assumption here is that 20 per cent of people make one trip by public transport each day, which roughly corresponds to public transport being used for 20 per cent of all trips - supposedly a State Government policy objective. If the mode share is only 3 per cent, as in most Melbourne suburbs at present, then the density required for viable public transport goes up proportionally - by our calculations, to 90 per hectare instead of 13.5 per hectare. And if concession passengers represent 90% of boardings, rather than just 50%, this pushes the figure up again, to a massive 123 per hectare. Very few parts of Melbourne record population densities this high.

>This basic observation lies at the root of road lobby calculations (like those by Alan Moran above) purporting to show that viable public transport requires the kind of enormous population densities seen only in crowded cities like New York, Paris or Singapore. Basically, if you assume that drastic improvements in service frequency (from typically 40-60 minutes at present to 10 minutes in our scenario) don't induce more people to use the service, it's not surprising the improvement turns out hard to justify!

You can run a bus every minute, 20% of people aren't going to ride it.

>>89726
...except that the Road Lobby is wrong

>>89601

GENERAL MOTORS DID IT

>>89726
Yeah, won't work when even the implementors are convinced there's an unsurmountable catch-22.

>>89747
Exactly. Even piss-poor bus systems with breadth as the only good thing buses catch everywhere from 80% to 20% of all passengers. That's without any real marketing, no real convenience effort in placing the buses where people already go, no simple speed-up efforts.

Make buses go /through/ the places people already go to (meaning for instance the FRONT DOOR of a mall and any reasonable attraction), make them skip traffic lights, advertise lots and design them to be attractive and hip. Then make them go often enough and synchronized enough.

bump

i believe america once had THE greatest rail network in the world.
Choo-Choo defined the west. however speculation and bankrupcy led to the death of the railway industry.

economics of scale and time, the car lobby etc.

still rail transport is moderately profitable only in places like japan and britain.

how profitable could it be in america, the main question?

in france high speed rail competes with short haul airtravel and wins.
faster than cars too. hell of a lot safer.

it should depend on the consumer tho.

>>89601

you're underestimating exactly how widespread trollies/streetcars used to be - in the great gatsby they mention riding between NYC and Boston by trolley around the turn of the century, and this isn't unusual at all. you could ride through the middle of nowhere, conneticut in a trolley, then switch to a west massachusetts/berkshire trolley, then get on the springfield trolley, then the worchester trolley, etc. this is what actually made up 90% of the streetcar trackage, but basically none of it made sense after the bus was invented that didn't need its own tracks and made better than 40mph.

>>89801
>>89801
i agree with you on the subject of streetcars. but it effectively destroyed the passenger rail too in the process.

streetcars would've converted to something better as their economic life ended.

>>89801
There just wasn't a will to build streetcars that go 40mph, replacing the rails was also necessary. Expensive, expensive. Buses are even today cheaper than streetcars -- in low volume and with cheap oil. On top of that hidden costs are greater, namely heavier street construction which streetcars can't hide and end up more expensive.

A modern streetcar is, however, the easiest thing to make profitable in today's cities. Buses don't scale up to high volume, and I believe that's partly by design: a bus-based traffic system is not economical enough to compete with cars' convenience. Streetcars can be made faster and longer, moving more people faster with less fuel cost and less drivers: this is economical.