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Fuck Maglev.
Regular ass trains on steel tracks can go >200mph if built to spec. Suuuure, maglev can go even faster. But regular ass trains on steel tracks can actually be build on a realistic budget. Like in theory atleast. But before the US does something this sane they’re gonna nuke themselves. idk
Maglev isn’t even more expensive. High speed rails that are built “to spec” for 400 km/h are expensive as fuck. Trains are usually shorter but frequency is higher, so per passenger it roughly evens out.
The real deal breaker is the lack of compatibility. Can’t ever run a maglev train on legacy rail while your high speed train can use the existing system to bridge gaps in the high speed network.
also, monorails of any sort are harder to switch than dual-rail lines, making the networks less flexible.
Well sir, there’s nothing on Earth like a genuine, bona-fide, electrified, six-car monorail!
Brockway!
I don’t see any problems with switching tracks on this thing.
I don’t know why you would want compatibility. The Shinkansen is also always on their own track. Air planes aren’t compatible with train tracks either, so if you look at it more from a perspective of what they’re trying to replace I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.
I think it’s also mainly the start up and build costs, I think the wear of the rails of high speed trains on wheels is very costly
So you can have your high speed trains run to more remote stations, limiting the amount of changes for passengers. Took the train to Grenoble that way, which is quite comfortable with a direct connection from Paris.
Not more expensive? Hard to say because also nobody builds them! But I don’t think there’s any specification you could make today that could be met cheaper with maglev than with old school big iron.
Regular ass train gang. Let’s stop trying to reinvent something that already works way better than whatever half ass bullshit you thought about for a couple hours.
Trams for short distance, metro for medium, trains for long and high-speed for very long.
It’s trains all the way down.
Well my train has blackjack and hookers
“Sir, as I’ve repeatedly told you, this is the casino and not a train. Are you hitting or sticking?”
We need a rail line that is strictly for commuters. Right now the rails are owned by freight companies so they prioritize freight over people. Yes we do have the infrastructure to initiate high speed rails, but those rails are used for objects not people.
Tbh they don’t even prioritize the freight, that went away with psr
Also like, magnets get destroyed in water, so how do you deal with rain? /s
Reverse the polarity
Maglev makes sense in connecting only the major cities like Japan is doing
regular ass trains on steel tracks can actually be build on a realistic budget
Cries in HS2
Don’t worry, the cost inflation of HS2 could easily be achieved on any maglev project too.
Imagine how this would disempower landlords if you could commute to either of those cities from anywhere between them.
Car dependency is about power, it’s about keeping workers vulnerable and reliant on constant employment to participate in society. The one thing the US and Canada has over other imperial powers is the obscene amount of space each state has at its disposal within the metropole with which to construct what really is an exceptional form of oppression. It’s important to recognize that when you’re talking about ending car dependency, this is an existential threat to either power, and they will treat it in kind.
There is convenience in the ineptitude of neoliberal politics in state-planning and infrastructure, which most people attribute as the cause of this development, but it’s crucial to remember that suburban sprawl and car dependency were state projects by the US and Canada in very much they same way neoliberal privatization is.
Car dependency is about power
BAM
Well it will take more than 2.5 hours if you start adding a bunch of stops.
I don’t think having one track would necessarily mean there is only one train route.
Nice try, commie, but a train doesn’t help GMAC make more car loans, nor does it help Exxon-Mobil sell more gasoline. Worse still, if people are commuting together they might build community and solidarity and then how will we keep them all working for 1/10 of the value they produce, huh? Next time think about Wall St before you go suggesting crazy ideas like high speed rail!
You also forgot about the private interests in building the rail. We can’t have the government doing this, that’s insane. Instead we need to find a way to funnel money to Union Pacific so they park their 2 mile long cargo trains for 3 hours blocking all amtrak trains. Then they can keep collecting maintenance fees which they pocket for decades until a train derails, at which point they begrudgingly replace some of the rotting lumber that’s been there for 200 years.
That’s the true american capitalist way. Anything else is just too expensive.
As a Londoner I can tell you straight up that commuting together does not build community and solidarity
More so than driving.
That’s because English. I’ve had very nice journeys where I’ve chatted with perfect strangers on Spanish trains, and to a lesser extent in other countries in Europe. You do want to understand the unspoken codes that signal “let’s talk” or “leave me the fuck alone”. Same happens in bars, for example. But yeah, my experiences in trains in Spain have been generally great, with the odd near horror story.
California: Hang on, we got another rich land owner suing us because the rail path would cut through their lucrative almond orchard that they pump ground water to use for flood irrigation because fuck you.
Hold on we have this super genius that says mood lit tunnels with Tesla’s in would be even cheaper and faster!
That whole project is a testament to American stupidity. Let’s all get into cars that drive themselves on a 3 mi underground track. It’s like Elon shits ideas from a toddler.
Its worse than that, look into the owners of Bellevue Square in Bellevue, WA. They basically forced light rail development to not land in the actual main downtown area and the family has a history of racism.
Its kind of fucking nuts how so many things lead back to racism when you look at US history
There’s no profit in building sensible infrastructure.
Only profit in endless wars against brown people
There’s lots of profit in building infrastructure. There’s little profit in finishing it. That’s why in US or UK you get endless construction projects that cost billions but never deliver anything useful.
Car infrastructure has lower up-front costs, but much higher lifetime costs than rail. That’s the real profit making scheme here. That, plus you have to buy a car to opt-in, which is a major expense and one that has to be made every 5-15 years.
Good news I almost paid mine off just in time for it to be worthless, I think I had 1.9% at 72 months.
Except there is plenty of profit in the form of increased commerce. Indirect profit is something corporations and government struggles with. Line will go up after this is built. Which takes more than a fucking quarter
They actively don’t want that. That means someone else is getting credit for their political capital, and as we all know it’s a zero sum game: if someone else is winning, you’re losing
More like three and a half hours if you want an actually usefull line that stops.at places where people wanna stop at and you add the time needed to accelerate and decelerate but yeah. Also thats calculating with 500kmh which is very much cutting edge and constructing a line like that takes decades BUT that doesnt mean such investments arent worth it and also just fixing transport within a city is already worth it.
China and Japan seem to have figured this shit out. How come the largest economy in the world can’t? Pissed about with Elon and his Hyperloop which would be too expensive for any regular person (extreme maintenance costs) and can’t move as many people (very limited size). And it didn’t even work! Meanwhile elsewhere the train wasn’t being reinvented, but improved, and it’s actually functional.
Also, you can have high speed transit between two major stations, then take local transit to your specific destination. That’s what central stations are supposed to be for.
Musk has openly admitted he propped Hyperloop for the sole purpose of stopping California to build a high speed train. He never intended to deliver anything.
This is one of those moments when I mentally ask “how the fuck is that even legal” but then I remember who writes the rules.
Not openly. He allegedly admitted it to his ghostwriter, behind closed doors, but publicly denies it. He claims it was a misunderstanding, which is plausible.
Which is some real cartoon villain shit
Yeahhh but chicago is several large cities away from new york so thats why im saying they would need a stop for each of them. You can of course have commuter trains that skip some of those and others that serve the less used ones of course, and shuttles as well but you also have to consider that chicago and ny are 1100kms away from each other in a straight line while tokyo and kyoto are 370kms from each other in a straight line for example and those are 2 hours by train(and i looked from the train stations which are not in the center of the city tho you could argue they are somewhat but these metropolitan areas are so large that they have multiple city centers) so that means if you just multiply it up you would get that the chicago-ny line would be a six hour journey. This is, of course, probably not correct. Im just trying to show how you cant just draw a straight line between two places and say “Train!”. Tho of course you also have to calculate with the fact that the us is much richer than both china and japan but once again that just complicates things again.
you cant just draw a straight line between two places and say “Train!”
Never forget what they took from us. They being the promoters of the ny-chicago electric air line railroad. Also if it were built and the right of way stayed intact we could absolutely build a maglev that could go center to center in 3 hours.
Nobody even considers that a problem for airplanes.
Plains fly over the obstacles? Thats kinda the point? Also i may have underestimated the amount of people flying in the us cause in europe one flight a day is completely normal for destinations at this distance. Of course if thousands of people want to move between these two locations each day a regular shuttle could make sense but you cant just ignore the distance, 2.5 hourse is a very very best case scenario. Planes can also fly boutta 1000kmh but that doesnt mean a place 1000kms away takes 1 hour, 1.5 to 2 hours is completely normal for a journey like that without accounting for all the flight related hassles. Of course thats a huge upside of trains but you cant just freely apply train to everything. This is very likely a place where a highspeed rail connection would make sense but nothing is ideal instantly. Not to talk about how these cities would have to improve their own public transit to be able to connect to a wider network efficiently.
Literally nobody ever thought we shouldn’t make a direct flight route from Chicago to New York because there’s other cities people might want to stop at. It’s similarly absurd problem to imagine for trains.
Having to plan connecting flights is a thing.
Of course, we don’t just not make direct flights between major cities because other cities are in between.
planes missing connections is rare and the airlines provide some degree of compensation, Amtrak has no such reputation.
And Elon has not produced a single workable anything, but sucked up billions in subsidies.
Hyperloop is incredibly stupid on the face of it for so many reasons, the two largest of which IMO actually being that it would be incredibly unsafe as escape would be impossible in case of an incident and that it’s literally physically impossible, as the material tolerances required are incompatible with the temperature shifts that happen everywhere on account of weather and seasons.
three and a half hours if you want an actually usefull line that stops.at places where people wanna stop at
You can run a multi-stop and an express train concurrently.
In fact, that is the norm.
A thing a lot of people don’t understand about high speed rail is that it needs to be very straight and very flat. Draw a straight line from those two cities and count the number of places it goes through, the different elevations and figure out how you’d bulldoze through it all.
China seems to have figured it out in their mountainous regions. Some of the lines are 90% tunnel+raised rails. And as an American we should talk about how China is roughly the same size as America. The excuse well has run dry.
I’m all for high speed rail in the US, but comparing the land area of the two countries is not really that relevant.
China’s network is really focused on about a third of the land area. US could do the same, but the big population hubs are separated and on opposite sides of the country, so it’s less ideal - lot of track to connect the two. It’s like 2-3x the distance to connect LA/NYC vs Chongqing/Shanghai.
China also has 4x the population of the US. So the cost/benefit to build this out is simply much more favorable for china.
Most importantly, China’s autocratic government can clear the red tape to get big projects like this done. Just getting the land rights to build the right track could kill a transcontinental project in the US. But that decision is consolidated in the Chinese government. This cuts time and cost immensely.
None of these points are strong enough to stop the idea of high speed rail in the US. The auto lobby alone does that.
Cool cool
Then build a HSR on the east coast and one on the west coast. How about we start with that first?
Then you can worry about the detail that isn’t even that important. Nobody is saying to build HSR coast to coast
Next you are going to tell me it’s not a good solution because of Hawai
But that’s a non issue. If you want to get from LA to NYC, you fly. If you want to get from Chicago to NYC or from LA to San Francisco, you take the HSR… I mean you would if the US had a fully developed transport infrastructure.
I mean sure but it’s the same issue, smaller scale at that point. You slashed the distance, but also the demand.
The big problem is always going to be getting the land anyway
The corridors I mentioned are perfectly fine HSR corridors, the population numbers and distances are great for HSR, perfectly suitable. That is absolutely not the propblem. Developed countries would have already HSR along those corridors, heavily used HSR, that is transformative for the places along it.
The problem is not getting the land, the problem is politics and legislation that is hostile to it and as a consequence it is nigh impossible to get that land for critical infrastructure like that (hostile legislation is also the reason why multiple the times of construction costs have to be paid for non-construction expenses, not even counting land acquisition). Curiously enough it is not impossible to ever widen highways or even build entirely new ones.
Thats why i drew a squiggly line when i calculated this lol
From a network perspective it wouldn’t make sense to build a Chicago - New York straight line with 0 stops… You’ld better link up Chicago to Cleveland, probably even do the Detroit detour and continue that in an expensive Appalachian tunnel to Washington DC. Then in a separate project build a high speed rail connecting the east coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington…
Also high-speed rail doesn’t run at top speed the whole time. You might have a few flat spots here and there, but most of the time it’s running much slower.
Also, if there’s a problem with a train, the whole rail goes down. If there’s a problem with an airplane, the other planes have a whole lot of sky they can still use.
Also, if there’s a problem with a train, the whole rail goes down. If there’s a problem with an airplane, the other planes have a whole lot of sky they can still use.
That’s not how rail works.
There absolutely are passing places where a train can hop onto the left track and then back again, or just a long stretch of an extra track going parallel to the main route where either the faulty train can sit and wait for repairs, or the working trains can jump around the faulty one.
Source: living in a country that actually has a working passenger railway system.
So only 4000 miles of grade-separated high-speed rail (and all the infrastructure and private property easements, divisions, etc required for the construction) just to connect just these 2 cities? No problem.
You don’t connect just those two cities, mate. You connect them as the main artery and then do split-offs to other areas. Or, even better, you weave the main railway between major cities East-to-West to connect them directly.
If you think that’s ludicrous, may I present Interstate 80?
we’ll be saying this 200 years from now
What are you talking about? Chicago-NYC are maybe 1200 km, perfectly within HSR distance and definitely within Maglev distance. The two urban areas are also huge enough to support such a thing, especially as there are a few mid sized urban areas in between.
This passing problem was solved a long time ago, it’s just that the freight rail corps in the US have “optimized” for trains that are longer than the passing rail sections. It’s extremely bad for the entire rail industry and the cause of many of the derailments and accidents, but because capital always gets its way in the US, nothing significantly has changed to resolve the issue.
It’s very frustrating how often there are perfectly workable solutions to making the world better, but if it doesn’t have a fat profit margin, it just gets strangled to death by capital interests in this country.
Aviation is grounded way more often than rail corridors are blocked. You’d know if you’d ever had lived in a place with developed infrastructure.
Also, yes, HSR built on dedicated high speed infrastructure, like the TGV or Shinkansen, does run most of the time close to max speed.
If you want to stop at multiple towns, then regular HSR makes sense. Maglev is suitable if you stop at most at Cleveland. (And extend to Minneapolis)
These trains would run at capacity all the time, being full of New Yorkers going to Chicago to get good pizza and immediately returning.
New Yorkers: 😠
Italians: 😠
Hawaians: 🍍
Everyone else: 😠 (for some reason everybody looks very invested in the pizza debate)
I like your boldness anyway
Be ungovernable.
🤢🤮
Deep pan, thin crust, round, square, folded, oily and greasy, masterpiece renaissance gluten art, who cares, it’s all good!
Be a pizza slut, not a pizza prude!
Pizza is pizza. But Chicago style is a casserole. They should just call it a Chicago casserole to avoid confusion. I can’t imagine the fury of someone ordering a pizza and getting a bread bowl of marinara sauce instead.
chicago has two types of pizza, the ‘deep dish’ you’re referring to, and the thin and crispy (tavern-style) cut in squares. pretty much only tourists eat the deep dish. locals usually go for the thin crust, maybe the other once a year.
fuck, I miss those thin crust Chicago tavern-style pizzas, and I’ve never even visited Chicago! I can’t seem to find any good ones withing a reasonable distance from where I live in a medium-sized city in a very major metropolitan area. It’s very frustrating.
Hawaiian pizza is Canadian
It could have been invented in North Korea and I’d still love it.
No wonder they say sorry so much
that’s not pizza, that’s casserole
And Chicagoans going for ny style cuz no one wants to eat a casserole everytime they eat pizza
The one form of pizza I refuse to acknowledge is deep dish. It’s a tomato pepperoni stew in a bread bowl with too much cheese.
too much cheese
Whaaaaaa? 🤯
I know! The words are grammatical English, but make no discernible sense whatsoever.
I hope one day the rest of the world will learn that Chicago deep dish is a gimmick, and what people in Chicago just call “pizza” is a completely different thing that’s way better.
What Americans call pizza in general is already a completely different thing, discussions if it’s better or worse completely aside.
That is a fucking casserole.
And a shitty casserole at that. Because a good casserole has cheese on the top.
It must be incredibly sad to go through life oblivious to the existence of pies.
Shitcago style.
American here, we’re dumb.
Its all the lead in the pipes, it makes the frogs gay with all the chemtrail fallout on this flat earth being watched by Jewish space laser satellites.
Why use mass transit when AI transit do trick?
You joke, but California’s high speed rail is looking into renting capacity to AI.
I have the utmost confidence in the TSAs ability to make rail stations just as bad as airports.
Oh you complain now, but as soon as someone hijacks a train and steers it off course into a building, you’ll be begging TSA to grope you before letting you cram yourself into a reasonably spacious train seat that a public entity runs and has no reason to maximize the number of bodies it can cram into one area to create more shareholder value.
(I’m not crying you are………)
They already do the inspections for rail stations and they’re about 1/10th as annoying and time-consuming as the ones for airports.
Trains just don’t have the capacity for a 9/11 so I don’t see that changing any time soon.
Trains just don’t have the capacity for a 9/11
Not to bring down buildings, but in terms of terrorism they sure do.
Any modern 9/11 attempt will be made by cargo jet. So protection against aircraft bringing down buildings is provided by the US airforce, not the TSA.
I feel like you said “No” and then agreed with me.
I agree with your whole statement, but disagree if it is broken up into separate parts.
Passenger vector terrorism is equal on trains and planes (and busses to a much lesser extent). This is the TSAs area.
Infrastructure damage is much higher on planes, but this also applies to the 10% of flights that are cargo and the TSA has no influence.
For whatever reason it’s just not equal in the US as far as I’m aware. Maybe it’s a benefit of a society who thinks trains are lame.
When the train’s average speed is 50mph and no-one uses them then the target isn’t big enough for large scale terror.
Your position is very confusing.
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Why would there be security checks at train stations? I know those are a thing in some countries, but this never made any sense to me. They aren’t where I live; a train can’t be driven into buildings and if something does explode on them (exactly as possible as in any crowd), the train will simply stop, not fall from the sky.
A similar number of people would be injured/die from a plane explosion as a train explosion.
Your arguments against no security checks apply equally to trains and planes (and busses).
Not really because an explosion on a train or bus doesn’t cause the entire vehicle to crash into the ground, only to stop. An explosion on a train or bus is going to kill or injure people in its radius of impact, but people sitting far away from it (granted: not many of those on a bus, but very much so on a long train) won’t be injured. On a plane, if that plane stops operating mid-flight, even people on the other end of the plane from the explosion are unlikely to survive.
An explosion in the front carriage of a train going 200mph is not going to be good for anyone travelling behind it.
OK, “won’t be injured” wasn’t exactly true; but they are still in a lot less danger than someone in the same situation on a plane. A train or bus can stop anywhere on its route if there is a dangerous situation, a plane cannot, so in my mind it makes a lot of sense that there are security checks before boarding a plane, but not when boarding a train or bus.
BigOil would like to have a word.
They have all the words. That’s why we don’t have shit like this and seemingly never will.
Elon would like to have a word
Meanwhile, Musk is at it again, pitching a hyperloop tunnel to link Austin and San Antonio. Nevermind that it’s a ton of limestone and aquifers along that route.
How’s that Vegas loop working? Last I heard it’s faster to walk.
Easy, we’re idiots.
Won’t someone think of the poor oil profits 🤣🤣
US consumes 20 million barrels a day. What, exactly, do you think this little blip of a train will change to that?
Yikes this comment section got flooded by car brains making some wild fucking claims.
This is doable, we just have to convince our leaders is bad for the environment, will hurt brown people, will get them filthy rich and also paint them fake gold and put Drumpfs name on each train
So yea, no,
Fucking AI an image of a gold train with Trump’s name on the side and get it trending.
We can always repaint it in a couple of years.
That’s actually worth a try.
The biggest issue is that it’s expensive and what we have now is functional. People aren’t keen on dropping tons of cash to make something better because they’re short-sighted and don’t care about the future.
Also NIMBY’s would shut it down hard, not wanting to live near the rail. There’d also be a lot of eminent domain claims when the rail would get close to any station point.
Back when the US had excellent rail networks, we could have upgraded and maintained them for passenger rail. But so much has been ripped out and paved over that it’d be very expensive to bring it back… and no one wants to pay more in taxes despite receiving more money back in benefit.
I get your point about how our existing transportation system is functional. I mean, it’s not, but it’s functional enough that people and policymakers can point to it and claim that it’s good enough. We can’t point to all of the trips that aren’t happening because our system is so godawful exactly because they’re not happening.
I just think of Amtrak’s Borealis route from Minneapolis to Chicago. It’s not terribly convenient (2 trains a day), nor that fast (7½ hours), nor all that cheap (close to $50), and it has blown ridership projections completely out of the water. A lot of people really want to take the train, and I understand, because the alternatives (driving or flying) are so much worse.
I have plenty of friends who’d love a train to Chicago. The Illinois Central route is still in use for freight. But Wisconsin just can’t get it together to offer passenger service. Beyond NIMBYs, as we saw in the campaign for governor in 2010, rail has become a political identity issue, coded as Democratic, so Republicans are reflexively against it. As well, it’s a racist dog-whistle, as seen in the bizarro claims that a train would bring Chicago crime to the city.
It’s functional in that people can get from point A to point B when they need to. Flights aren’t prohibitively expensive enough to push people to take the tax increase. A flight from Minneapolis to Chicago is like $100-$200, and for the rare occurrence someone needs that specific route, it’s not that expensive to pay for.
Don’t get me wrong, we’d be much better off with a national rail network connecting major cities. But Americans are some of the most cost-averse voters, both on the left and right. And you’re looking at a multi-billion dollar project for something like a Chicago to NYC line. The citizens of Illinois and NYC aren’t keen to take the tax hike. Fed won’t pay for it since it only benefits 2 specific voter bases and doesn’t do anything to swing an election (Dems win those cities anyway, Republicans will never take them over even if they funded rail).
Agreed that it’s functional in that people can get from point A to point B, but just throwing in that are a lot of people who nevertheless don’t make trips because those trips are harder and more stressful than they need to be. (Elderly and disabled people, and children, as some examples.) As well, our system requires lots of trips that people don’t want, or shouldn’t need, to make.
$50 from Minneapolis to Chicago isn’t cheap?
In my mind, I compare it to the Amtrak 30-day pass that I paid $600 for, and went all the way around the western half of the U.S.
What we have now is not functional. And you will never convince me that we somehow don’t have enough money to make the average American’s life better, but somehow we have the money to spend 43.6 billion, so far, on a pointless war with Iran. We have the money
The problem isn’t that it can’t happen, the problem is people won’t vote to pay more in taxes. Left or right, we’ve shown that any candidate that runs on increasing taxes gets slaughtered because the voter base is too short sighted. New rail is incredibly expensive, taxes would need to be increased to pay for it (the money HAS to come from somewhere).
It’s “functional” in that people can get from Chicago to NYC relatively quickly - through a flight. Sure, it’s gonna cost a few hundred $$ a person, but it’s not enough of a barrier to get people to pay significantly more in taxes for a few years to pay for an alternative.
The federal government isn’t going to step in and do something like this ever either. They’re the only ones who could even conceivably do this, but spending billions for 2 specific states doesn’t sway voters from the other 48.
You missed the point. We do not have to increase taxes to achieve this. We just have to stop bombing the shit out of half the world and reallocate that funding.
Our taxes could stay exactly the same. Of course the lobbyists prefer we spend billions and billions on pointless wars and the military, but we don’t get shit from it.
Only if the federal government paid for it, and they won’t for the reasons I mentioned. No use catering to a vote they already have.
I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s a massive side effect of the way our government works. Swing states are the only things that matter and none of them are in need of high speed rail
We may not have a functional rail system, but we have an excellent highway system, and there is absolutely no reason that high speed rail lines can’t be run down the medians of many highways, eliminating much of the eminent domain issues.
There will still be pain points, but that’s the challenge of progress. A national High Speed Rail system would be worth the trouble.
I personally agree, but the voter base doesn’t. People are unwilling to take the tax increase over taking a flight for the rare occurrence they go between the two cities. And the issue is getting INTO the city, not near the city. Once you hit the suburbs of either city you’re fucked. Not that it can’t be done, but the price tag skyrockets and that makes it a harder pill for voters to swallow.
