US High-Speed Rail

Everyone would love a high speed train going where they travel.They will never, for good reason, be built for most routes.Because they're very expensive, both to build and operate, so they're only sustainable between large cities at a mediums distances apart.China, with maybe 10x the population density of the US, has a huge number of such routes. The US does not.

The original rail network was on par with airplanes in terms of relative improvement of speed of travel. The highway network did the same for travel to areas unlikely to ever get a rail connection. (There aren't that many sparsely populated countries with a rail connection to every town; even fairly dense countries don't manage this.)In today's world, HSR fills a very specific market niche; planes are much faster for long distances due to higher speed and small requirements for

What makes (high-speed or normal-speed) rail a success is a population density. A train moves a lot of people, that's its point. For it to work, these people need to work close to it, and move along it often.Passenger railways make sense in places where one metropolis is close to another, and to yet another, etc, with suburbs commuting to these cities, too. This is what you see in Europe like Germany / Netherlands / France, this is what you see in central Japan, this is

I want high speed trains as much as the next person, but they don’t work for the United States in the same way that flying does.High speed rail would work on the coasts and in specific intercity regions. There most definitely should be high speed rail between nearby large cities - Texas, the Midwest, and California could really use high speed rail systems.But the lack of these routes aren’t necessarily a disaster at present, especially when Americans generally need a car at their destinati

> Passenger rail in the United States probably doesn’t have the same economics as the other places you’re thinking of. I recently drove across part of the country, and it is shocking how much space there is with absolutely nothing there. There is a 100 mile stretch of I-80 without cell service or signs of habitation. If you live in a city, it’s easy to forget that the United States is much, much, bigger than Europe or Japan.Visit China sometime. Lots of space, lots of high speed rail. The

(BTW can anyone tell me how to use markdown in HN?)I read through part of the discussion but can someone enlightens me does it make sense to build high speed railway in the States? Every piece of reply tells me that cost is going to be prohibitive and it's not going to be faster than taking airplanes.Back in China it does make a lot more sense to have trains connecting each city, because:- Each city, even the 3rd and 4th tier ones have a lot of people and they move around to get jo

Sure, but the distances between cities in a huge country like the USA tend to be much greater than in Europe or Japan. Even if you had high speed rail it’d still take a very long time to cross the continent!High speed trains do exist, or are being built, in more densely populated US regions (eg Northeast corridor, California).

Both Europe and China are of comparable size to the US, and they enjoy high speed train since decades ago. It won't replace a NYC-LA trip anytime now, but the coastal corridors and various regional hubs (Texas triangle, lake Michigan, etc) are perfectly sized.

I feel compelled to point out that high-speed passenger rail isn't likely to be anywhere near as successful in the US as in Europe even if heavily subsidized.One problem is population density. The US is geographically twice the size of the EU, but has three fifths the population. Germany is the size of Montana, but has 90 million people. Typical travel distances are short, and the number of travelers on any given day is high. Fixed costs would be proportionally higher for a US service as a re

they exist, but arent really used. the us is much bigger / less dense intercity. going across the coasts is six hour flights but days(4ish i think) by train and significantly more cost, with not many cities in the middle that people stop at. too few people would use so theres no motivation to make it faster. where it works decently well is northeast, because the cities are very close together(dc,philly,nyc,boston). but it's usually much more expensive than driving/bussing and