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Re: Another Bait and switch
Author: observer
Date: 02-13-2019 - 08:48
A couple of thoughts that occured after pressing Submit...
There was and is a basic fallacy that HSR is supposed to compete with air travel between N & S California. That doesn't work. Yes, it's theoretically possible with existing HS trains and route design (not even Hyperloop) to achieve downtown-downtown express times of around 2.5-3 hours. As we've found, it's also dramatically expensive to build and operate that. Really, trains have little business competing in the "flyover" market - air travel will remain the way to go where there are no stops for 400 miles, short of a practical Hyperloop thing operating at close to sonic speeds.
Rail, however, is a much better way to go where there are people in between the downtowns that want and need to go to them. That's what trains have always done - mass transit. There are perhaps a couple of named expresses that make few or no stops, but the bread and butter is limiteds and locals. For modern travel purposes, that requires trains that can run at a decent speed - over 100mph but probably much less than 180 - and can accel/decel well enough to make station stops that are a reasonable distance apart. IOW US HSR, not European or Chinese. Closer, actually, to Japanese (which is fast but not superfast). Not every little town and suburban tract can have a stop; local transit needs to be improved (or enough parking lots provided) to let train stops be far enough apart to allow decent speeds, and provisions need to be made for some trains to skip stops. But still, regional and state-scale rail is all about the intermediate traffic - really just a step or 2 above urban transit and commuter trains. The real competition isn't airplanes: it's drivers and bus riders.
There was and is a basic fallacy that HSR is supposed to compete with air travel between N & S California. That doesn't work. Yes, it's theoretically possible with existing HS trains and route design (not even Hyperloop) to achieve downtown-downtown express times of around 2.5-3 hours. As we've found, it's also dramatically expensive to build and operate that. Really, trains have little business competing in the "flyover" market - air travel will remain the way to go where there are no stops for 400 miles, short of a practical Hyperloop thing operating at close to sonic speeds.
Rail, however, is a much better way to go where there are people in between the downtowns that want and need to go to them. That's what trains have always done - mass transit. There are perhaps a couple of named expresses that make few or no stops, but the bread and butter is limiteds and locals. For modern travel purposes, that requires trains that can run at a decent speed - over 100mph but probably much less than 180 - and can accel/decel well enough to make station stops that are a reasonable distance apart. IOW US HSR, not European or Chinese. Closer, actually, to Japanese (which is fast but not superfast). Not every little town and suburban tract can have a stop; local transit needs to be improved (or enough parking lots provided) to let train stops be far enough apart to allow decent speeds, and provisions need to be made for some trains to skip stops. But still, regional and state-scale rail is all about the intermediate traffic - really just a step or 2 above urban transit and commuter trains. The real competition isn't airplanes: it's drivers and bus riders.
