If we invested as much into rail safety as we do into air safety, it'd be fair to compare them. Regardless, in the long term rail transportation is simply much more sustainable and increased investment is very much warranted
> And in the rare cases when things do go wrong your chances of survival are much higher.
That's a completely irrelevant metric.
The only thing that matters is my risk of injury/death per passenger mile. Trains are much worse. End of story.
What you're saying is that trains get into far more accidents, but that don't injure/kill you. On top of still being much more likely to injure/kill you.
Granted the lines are a natural monopoly. I don't see why the usual regulatory approaches shouldn't work. The government could even provide the infrastructure similar to highways.
> sometimes more expensive
Examples? Because that seems patently ridiculous on its face given the differences in energy requirements.
There are plenty of places with functional rail systems to compare to. This stuff isn't rocket science.
That is indeed absurd, and I would argue a clear regulatory failure. Thank you for the example though. That is pretty wild.
Still, there's a decent chance I'd personally choose to pay that premium for the comfort afforded by train travel while nonetheless being disgusted by the broader situation.
Doesn’t the Shinkansen and other HSR systems get rid of at grade road crossings? Yes, without people actually crossing in the tracks, you’ll get less deaths that way.
This seems like an awfully fanciful idea for anywhere but places with the most dense rail networks per sq km, at least if we're talking a full-scale refactor of existing infrastructure, in terms of financial, physical, logistics.
Is it not somewhat true that rail/freight companies have more authority over the land that their lines run through than the regions do? I may be talking out of my ass here, but I feel cities and provinces in Canada pretty much have to yield to CN or BNSF in some form or another; they operate their own police afaik. Railyards seem to be regarded as defacto permanent fixtures in terms of urban infrastructure.
> anywhere but places with the most dense rail networks per sq km
It seems to be the contrary to me. In Japan or France (in the denser places of these countries, because they have plenty of low density areas) building a whole new dedicated rail network was (and still is, see the Bordeaux-Toulouse LGV project) a major undertaking because there's no way to avoid built-up areas. The high-speed lines go from city center to city center, and we're talking about Paris and Tokyo here.
The Shinkansen and TGV use dedicated rail networks, that are built from scratch and are still being expanded. TGV can use legacy lines as well at low speed (including at grade road crossings, although these have almost completely been replaced today) not sure about Shinkansen.
In contrast, it seems to me like it should be easier in the US to find space for cheaper bypasses, tunnels and bridges since it's less dense.
In what way is it fanciful? There's an extensive network of interstates in the US with nearly zero intersections. If it's viable for I-90 why isn't it viable for the equivalent rail line?
If you don’t mind losing I-90 for car use, you could just repurpose the right of way. Otherwise, you just need to build another I-90 for HSR, well, it wouldn’t need to be as wide, you probably could do more tunneling and viaducting through the mountains so it doesn’t slow down much like the real I-90 does. But in Seattle, I don’t think there is room for another new right of way, so you have to tunnel or somehow run it down the middle of the freeway (and forget about lake Washington, you would need a new floating bridge unless you could stomach the slowness of going around.
All can be solved with lots of money (and the space issues can be solved with even more money).
Well, if all the interstates did have plenty of intersections, and someone proposed removing them all retroactively, would that not be an absolutely gargantuan undertaking at present, to the point where justifying it would seem fanciful?
Given the current state of US passenger rail I suppose such a proposal is closer to building out the interstate system from scratch. Which is indeed a bit on the fanciful side.
On the other hand, who says you have to do the entire country at once? Perfect is the enemy of good and all that.
Japan has an average density of 338 people per sqkm.
There’s only 3 US states with a density higher than that (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey) and an additional 2 US states of at least 220 people per sqkm (Maryland and Connecticut).
The US isn’t population dense enough for such transportation to make sense.
Nobody’s proposing to build rail in flyover country, but there are many places where high speed rail make sense based on GDP and population density (CAHSR, DC-NYC-Boston maglev, DFW-Houston)
Flyover county was definitely included in my initial response about at grade crossings, but wasn't specific to passenger rail, and why wouldn't it hypothetically be included? There already is rail everywhere, that's why I suggested it's a bit fanciful, it's just mostly freight. Doesn't necessarily need to be bullet trains, but given how bad North America seems to be at building any major rail projects in the modern era, I don't really have high hopes for advancement in this area, just dreams.
I do tend to prefer rail whenever viable, and the cascades route is already halfway decent, just not competitive on any front except ease of access with flying.
Density over some wide area is the wrong metric here. An entire state is absurdly large (in most cases). Two dense endpoints can be separated by quite a distance and still be worth connecting.
Tokyo has 8.9M people while LA has 3.9M people; half the number. Osaka (3rd largest) is 2.7M people while San Jose (3rd largest) is just under 1M people; again, half the number. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 500km, while from LA to San Jose is 550km. (In both cases, the 2nd largest city is nearby the largest.)
You have half the justification in CA you do in Japan, looking at similar urban areas. In the case of Japan, connecting those two cities goes through another 3 with over 1M population (and totaling over 7M together).
US cities are spread out and relatively low population.
> Tokyo has 8.9M people while LA has 3.9M people; half the number. Osaka (3rd largest) is 2.7M people while San Jose (3rd largest) is just under 1M people; again, half the number. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 500km, while from LA to San Jose is 550km. (In both cases, the 2nd largest city is nearby the largest.)
Paris has 2M people and Bordeaux has 1M people (sixth largest urban area in France), they are 500 km apart. How come France is able to operate a dedicated high-speed line between these cities? The third largest city on that line is Tours with 360k people or so.
California has almost the same population density as France, actually, but it's less spread out so just one line would be much more useful than a single line is in France.
Canada just announced a high-speed line project between Québec, Montreal and Toronto, by the way.
Why is Japan's density the magic number? A given route is either viable or not.
The US historically had much more passenger rail than it currently does. You haven't provided any convincing reasons why that shouldn no longer be workable in the modern day.
The US created a cross country rail network, basically by government fiat and investment, well before there was anyone out there to ride them.
Hell, a lot of towns with good rail access nowadays in the US only exist BECAUSE the rail line was built there.
It's hilarious how often "but density" is wheeled out to complain how we can't do trains when, not only did we use trains to create density, but the US has regions that are denser than Europe and could easily support comprehensive rail. The US is a place where people are unwilling to buy a car that can't go 300 miles on a whim. People used to take the trains for day long trips.
There is no excuse but political. We could talk about how expensive it is to build anything in the US but the US has always had massive pork in large projects and is so fucking rich that if we stopped giving free tax breaks to billionaires and maybe go a decade without having to artificially inflate our economy we could build the most expensive railroad network in the world with giant kickbacks included and STILL benefit and afford it.
We could financially justify not just removing grade crossings, but a literal maglev between DC and NYC (The city pair has higher GDP than Osaka and Tokyo, which is actually getting a maglev)
Don't know how it is in the US, but it's similar for cars, highways don't cross small routes either there's typically a (small) bridge involve (no need for viaduct).
Limited access, freeways in crowded areas take space, hence my point about viaducting (or tunneling) to create more space. But ya, if you pay for the spaces of the bridges over the freeway through your downtown urban area, you can also do that with a train if you have more space for it (or tunnel the train under). China just doesn’t have that kind of space, which is why you see viaducts everywhere in cities like Shanghai or Beijing.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if aircraft can generally slow down faster than trains, assuming level flight and grade (or the same climb rate)
It’s not really fair though, because the aircraft has so much force acting against it from how fast it’s moving. If somehow a jet was moving at train speeds and could only use its aerodynamic surfaces to slow down, it would probably take a while.
HN is full of clickbait messages like this. US and Canada can use a lot more trains, but air transport is more suitable for medium to long distance, such as this Minneapolis-Toronto route. They are complementary.
The accident occurred on the ground, any aircraft is susceptible, “more trains” doesn’t make it less so.
The conventional wisdom is that high speed rail is competitive with flying when travel time is at most 4.5 hours. But China has been challenging that with some ridiculously long routes, such as 2760 km from Beijing to Kunming (10 hours 43 minutes). I think the idea is that if flight time is long enough that you can't travel and work reasonably on the same day, you have to dedicate the entire day for travel. Then the difference between a 3.5-hour flight and a 10-hour train trip is no longer that significant.
"Night trains" (where the train effectively doubles as lodging for 8--12 hours) make even longer-haul routes quite viable. Even without HSR that affords nearly 1,000 mi / > 1,500 km of range (80 mph constant / 130 kph).
At typical HSR speeds of 185 mph / 300 kph, that extends to ~2,200 mi / 3,600 km. That's sufficient for travel from SF to Chicago, or NYC to Salt Lake (with range to spare).
(Both calculations presume 12 hours and operating largely at top speeds, both of which may be atypical in practice, but do satisfy the maximum possible range question.)
Travel within major population corridors, generally the east coast (Boston, Minneapolis, Miami, Houston) or west (San Diego, Phoenix, Seattle, Salt Lake, Denver) should be highly viable.
And as is often noted, rail operates city-centre to city-centre, and typically has fewer security checks and delays.
> air transport is more suitable for medium to long distance, such as this Minneapolis-Toronto route.
Eh maybe. That's not much longer than Beijing-Shanghai. Rail can definitely be competitive.
> The accident occurred on the ground
Plane crashes generally do. Given that all plane journeys involve at least one takeoff and landing, it's fair to consider collisions and incidents during those as part of a safety comparison.
> Eh maybe. That's not much longer than Beijing-Shanghai. Rail can definitely be competitive.
Connecting two growing mega cities by rail in a country that can still build things vs two mid-tier cities in two different countries, neither of which build anything without a decade of delays and 3x the budget (before the projects get cancelled), is not a good analogy to use against flight IMO.
China eastern airlines has its own desk at the airport to deal with Beijing-Shanghai flights, even after HSR was built out there are still more planes flying between those two mega cities than Minneapolis and Toronto (makes sense if you consider connecting flights wouldn’t benefit from HSR very much). Maybe when they get a maglev going…
Beijing and Shanghai are the two largest cities in China. There is enough demand to justify trains. There are also at least 50 daily flights between the two cities.
Now what is the demand between Minneapolis and Toronto?
Improved transport infrastructure tends to induce demand. We're familiar with this in terms of highway widening, from the paradox that widening highways tends to not improve traffic speeds. Famously Los Angeles today sees comparable net travel speeds as existed in the age of horse-drawn transport, though of course far more net daily passenger miles.[1]
Another example I like to cite is of Denver, CO, which grew roughly seven-fold in population in the decade after it was linked to the then-new US Transcontinental Railroad, 1870--1880:
Rail build-outs competing with existing air links is another matter of course, though experience in Europe, Japan, and China should help provide useful data.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Discussion of LA freeway speeds generally, noting several stretches (including those recently widened) netting < 20 mph: "Five years after Sepulveda Pass widening, travel times on the 405 keep getting worse" (2019) <https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/6/18531505/405-widening-traffic...>. I'm not finding the specific horses-to-cars comparison though I'm sure I've encountered it before.
The twin cities MSA has a population of about 3.7 million, the Toronto CMA 6.2 million, so Chinese cities at a similar metropolitan area population and distance would be Kunming and Changsha. Which see 20 trains a day per direction, not counting the slower sleeper trains (and also 10-12 flights per day).
The population comparison is misleading. Kumming and Chiangsa are part of Shanghai–Kunming railway. The trains between these two cities don't stop at either, but connect all the stations on the larger railway. Compare that to flights between Minneapolis and Toronto. The majority of passengers are point to point, as transit passengers from Minneapolis probably take hubs such as Chicago or NYC, not Toronto. There are up to 6 daily flights between MSP and YYZ, so up to 600 passengers daily. That'd fill up less than a train. That doesn't justify a high speed passenger train connection between the two cities.
The original assertion is that train can probably replace airplane on this route. That doesn't make any sense.
> and also 10-12 flights per day
That are probably those who want to travel directly between the two cities. So even though train option exists people still choose to fly.
> Kumming and Chiangsa are part of Shanghai–Kunming railway. The trains between these two cities don't stop at either, but connect all the stations on the larger railway.
Which would be the same for a North American rail network. Kunming was Minneapolis in this analogy, trains to Toronto could carry on to Boston or Montreal or New York just as trains to Changsa carry on to Shanghai.
> The original assertion is that train can probably replace airplane on this route.
I don't think anyone claimed that it would replace planes completely. It could be competitive, it could be an option for people who want it.
> Maybe we should build more railways. The ground is more stable than the air.
As if this accident could have been avoided if there were trains between Minneapolis and Toronto. I am saying that is wrong, because the passengers on this route wouldn’t take train. High speed trains would help if there is enough demand. There is not. Your examples are for a different market that don’t apply. You didn’t prove otherwise.
Trains are good. I love trains.
> It could be competitive, it could be an option for people who want it
> As if this accident could have been avoided if there were trains between Minneapolis and Toronto
You don't have to replace every flight to reduce the amount of flights, or to give people an alternative.
> High speed trains would help if there is enough demand. There is not. Your examples are for a different market that don’t apply. You didn’t prove otherwise.
The population sizes are the same. The geography is similar. The differences are political choices, not immutable facts.
If you want to say something then say it. No, I don't think there's any particular physical reason for that; I think the poor state of north american passenger rail is almost entirely for political reasons and could be changed if the public had the will to improve it.
Beijing and Shanghai are two of the most important cities in the world. Minneapolis and Toronto are not. Of course it’s physically possible to build a high-speed train from Minneapolis to Toronto, but it makes little sense to do so unless you’re building all the O(n^2) point-to-point links between all the medium-importance cities in North America.
