China has the fastest and largest
high-speed rail network in the world. The country has more than 19,000
miles of high-speed rail, the vast majority of which was built
in the last decade. Japan's bullet trains can reach speeds
of almost 200 miles per hour. And date back to the 1960s. They've become a staple for domestic travel
and have moved more than 9 billion people without a
single passenger casualty. France began service of the high-speed TGV
train in 1981 and the rest of Europe quickly followed. And high-speed rail is quickly expanding all
over the world in places like India, Saudi Arabia, Russia
Iran and Morocco. And then there's the U.S. The U.S. used to be one of the world's global
leaders in rail but after World War II there was a massive shift. If you look at the United States prior
to 1945, we had a very extensive rail system everywhere. It all was working great except a number
of companies in the auto and oil industries decided that for them to
have a prosperous future they really needed to basically help phase out all the
rail and get us all into cars. The inflexible rails permanently embedded
in cobblestones were paved over to provide smooth, comfortable transportation
via diesel motor coach. General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil
and a few other companies that got together and they were able to
buy up all the nation's streetcar systems and then quickly start
phasing out service and literally dismantling all the systems over
about a 10-year span. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower
signed a bill to create the National Interstate System. It allocated about $25 billion dollars
to build 41,000 miles of highways. The federal government paid for 90% of
that, the states covered the final 10 and rail fell by the wayside. Can't you see that this highway means a
whole new way of life for the children? And a way of life that we have
a chance to help plan and, and to build. We dedicated a huge amount of
dollars to building automobile infrastructure in the middle of the 20th century and
we're still kind of attached to that model of development. We went from a rail-served country to
a auto-dependent nation by the 1960s. We've become a car culture and it's
hard to break out of that cycle. Not to mention the fact that in
our political system we have very powerful oil lobbies, car manufacturing lobbies,
aviation lobbies, all the entities that the high-speed rail would
have to compete with. This is the American dream
of freedom on wheels. We average some 850 cars per
thousand inhabitants in the U.S., in China it's only 250. And we've never gone back. But according to some this
country's transportation ecosystem is reaching a tipping point. When you look at what's happening
with the corridor development, again states across the U.S. who are recognizing they are running out
of space to expand their highways or interstates. There are limits at airports, there
is aviation congestion, so what are the options? A better rail system is one
and could come with significant benefits. It's largely an environmental good to
switch from air traffic and car traffic to electrified
high-speed rail. That's a much lower
emission way of traveling. When the high-speed rail between Madrid
and Barcelona in Spain came into operation, I mean air travel just
plummeted between those cities and everyone switched over to high-speed
rail which was very convenient. People were happier. They weren't forced to switch, they did
it because it was a nicer option to take high-speed rail. There's a sort of a rule of thumb
for trips that are under three or four hours in trip length from city to city,
those usually end up with about 80 or 90 percent of the
travel market from aviation. Where rail exists and it's convenient
and high-speed, it's very popular. America I think is waking up to this
idea that rail is a good investment for transportation infrastructure. One survey showed 63% of Americans would
use high-speed rail if it was available to them. Younger people want it even more. Right now the main passenger
rail option in the U.S. is Amtrak. It's operated as a for-profit company
but the federal government is its majority stakeholder. Train systems reaching top speeds of over
110 to 150 miles per hour are generally considered high-speed and only one
of Amtrak's lines could be considered as such. That's its Acela line in the
Northeast Corridor running between D.C., New York and Boston. One of the challenges we face is that
the Northeast Corridor has a lot of curvature, a lot of geometry. We really operate Acela Express on an
alignment that in some places was designed back in the nineteen hundreds and
so it really was never designed for high-speed rail. And while the Acela line can reach up
to 150 miles per hour, it only does so for 34 miles of its 457 mile span. Its average speed between New York and
Boston is about 65 miles per hour, which is in stark contrast to
China's dedicated high-speed rail system which regularly travels at over
200 miles per hour. But some people are
trying to fix that. In 2008 California voted
yes on high-speed rail. Now, a decade later, construction is underway
in the Central Valley of the state. And right now it is the
only truly high-speed rail system under construction in the U.S. Ultimately high-speed rail is a 520
mile project that links San Francisco to Los Angeles and
Anaheim, that's phase one. And it's a project that's
being built in building blocks. So the one behind me is the
largest building block that we're starting with, this 119 mile segment. This segment will run
from Bakersfield to Merced. Eventually the plan is to build a
line from San Francisco to Anaheim, just south of L.A. But as it stands the state is almost
$50 billion short of what it needs to actually do that. The current project as planned would
cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. There's been too little oversight
and not enough transparency. We do have the capacity to complete
a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield. After Gavin Newsom made that speech
President Trump threatened to pull federal funding for the project. We will continue to
seek other funding. We hope the federal government will
resume funding the, contributing new funds to the project. I think in the future, as
the federal government has funded major construction of infrastructure over time
they'll again direct money to high-speed rail because in fact it's
not just California but other states are also interested in
high-speed rail systems. To complete the entire line as planned,
the official estimate is now over $77 billion and it's unclear where
the money will come from. So why is it so expensive? Part of the problem in California, the
big price tag is getting through the Tehachapi, very expensive tunneling, or over
the Pacheco Pass to get into San Jose from the Central Valley. You know, Eastern China, the flatlands
of Japan where they've built the Shinkansen, all of those are settings
where they have, didn't incur the very high expense of boring and tunneling
that we face so the costs are different. And a lot of the money is
spent before construction can even begin. Just in this little segment here
alone we're dealing with the private property owner, we're dealing with a
rail company, we're dealing with the state agency and so
just the whole coordination. Then we're dealing with a utility
company, just in this very small section; we had to relocate two miles
of freeway and that was roughly $150 million per mile. So there's a lot of moving pieces
to, you know, anywhere we start constructing. China is the place
that many folks compare. They have like 29,000 kilometers of high-speed
rail and 20 years ago they had none. So how have they been able
to do it so quickly? And part of it is that the state
owns the land, they don't have private property rights like we
have in the U.S. You don't have the regulations we have
in terms of labor laws and environmental regulations that
add to cost. It also delays the projects. For some reason and I've never really
quite seen an adequate explanation as to why costs to build transit or
many big infrastructure projects are just dramatically higher than in other parts
of the world, including in other advanced countries. But the bottom line is we're really
bad at just building things cheaply and quickly in the U.S. in general. So it's not just rail infrastructure
that is expensive, all transportation infrastructure is. Just the physical investment in the freeway usually
will be 5 to 8 to 10 million per mile but if you add
seismic issues and land acquisition and utilities and environmental mitigation and
remediation of soils and factors like that it can become as high
as 100 or 200 million a mile. The numbers for high-speed rail can vary
anywhere from 20 to 80 million per mile. The big reason why America is behind
on high-speed rail is primarily money. We don't commit the dollars needed to
build these systems, it's really as simple as that. And it's largely a political issue. We don't have political leaders who
really want to dedicate the dollars needed. There's a lot of forces in America
that really don't want to see rail become our major mode of transportation
especially because it will affect passenger numbers on airplanes, it'll
affect the use of autos. So you have the politics, the
message shaping and then the straight advertising and all three of those
coordinate and work together to keep America kind of focused on cars
and not focused on rail. Some of the earliest support for
rail came from the Nixon administration. Some of the original capital subsidies
and operating subsidies for urban transit came from the Republican party, so
I think it's only more recently that maybe this has shifted that more
liberal leaning folks who care about climate and a whole host of urban
issues have really argued for investing very heavily in rail. If you had Democratic leadership on the
Senate and a different president or potentially some leverage for a president to
sign a new budget bill with some dollars for high-speed rail,
that could override those objections from Republicans in Congress. But I think it's mostly ideological. They're big on highways. They're big on things
like toll roads. They just, they don't want the government
spending dollars on this kind of project and they see it as
something those socialist European countries do but not something that should be
done in, you know, car-loving America. In my judgment, it would take a
very strong federal commitment, almost sort of a post-Second World War interstate
highway kind of large scale national commitment. This is why some high-speed rail
projects are trying to avoid public funding altogether. One company, Texas Central, plans to build
a bullet train from Houston to Dallas without using a
dime of taxpayer money. We're taking what is laborious, unreliable
four-hour drive if you're lucky and turning that into a
reliable, safe 90 minutes. And when you look at that as a
business plan being driven by data, this is the right place to build the first
high-speed train in the United States. The Texas project is backed by investors
motivated to make a profit and will use proven
Japanese rail technology. Texas Central's goal is to
complete the project by 2025. Another private company is even further
along with its rail system, in Florida. It's expanding its higher-speed
train from Miami to Orlando. Orlando's the most heavily visited
City the United States. Miami is the most heavily visit
international city in the United States. It's too far to drive, it's too short
to fly, we had the rail link and that was really the
genesis of the project. Wes Edens has invested heavily in Florida's
rail project which used to be called Brightline. Brightline recently rebranded to Virgin
Trains as the company partnered with Richard Branson's Virgin Group. The team at Brightline, which is now
called Virgin Trains, has proven that it can work. The people actually want to get out of
their cars and they'd love to be on trains. In order to reach profitability, the
company sacrificed speed to save money. If you want to really go
high-speed you have to grade separate. So you basically have to build a bridge
for 250 miles that you then put a train on. That sounds hard, and it sounds expensive
and it's both of those things. So a huge difference in cost, a huge
difference in time to build and not that much of a reduction in service. And now tech companies are
getting involved with infrastructure projects. In the Pacific Northwest a high-speed
rail plan is underway to connect Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. Microsoft contributed $300,000 towards
research for the project. Our number one priority from Microsoft as
well it to really see and pursue this high-speed rail effort happen. If you look around the United States
and where all of the Fortune 500 companies are located they all are
in a similar situation to Microsoft. The housing is unaffordable,
traffic congestion is epic. It's too hard to get
anywhere and to get employees. So high-speed rail can solve this
same exact problem in numerous regions around the United States. So is the private sector the answer
to bringing high-speed rail to the U.S.? If the private sector wants to invest
in transportation and as long as it's not impinging on the public taxpayers I
don't see a problem with private sector moving forward. And I think there is some truth that
the private sector is gonna have much more of an incentive to hurry up
on the construction and get things done more quickly, more cheaply. That said, the private sector still has
to operate with the oversight and regulatory responsibilities of
the public sector. So for example environmental review doesn't
go away just because it's a private sector project. Labor standards don't go away. The difference is that they don't have to
keep trying to sell a project to the public for a vote to
raise taxes or sell bonds. Some people remain optimistic
that the U.S. can catch up to the rest of the
world and have a robust, high-speed rail system. We're building that right
now behind us. This 119 mile segment that we want
to expand with the money we already have to 170 miles, it's going to serve
a population of 3 million people in the Central Valley. So it's, not only do I
believe, but it's under construction. A lot of activity is now taking
shape, state rail authorities have been shaped in four or five states, so
they're actually taking these on now as a legitimate project
and moving forward. I think the future is very bright
for train travel in the United States. There's broad consensus with our policy
leaders in industry that it's time to move an infrastructure bill and
that will certainly help kickstart U.S. rail. Others are much less confident. I wish I were
a little more optimistic. It's just very difficult to
make the economics work here. No one has embraced it as a
strong part of their political platform. There's just too many other
tough pressing problems we're facing. I don't see us catching up
to where the world is. It would take such a massive infusion
of dollars for that to happen in California and probably waving a
number of environmental requirements and some other government regulations that
hinder the quick deployment of these projects in favor
of other values. My own instincts are that it's going
to be decades and decades of decades before you'll be able to go a
one-seat trip from San Diego to Sacramento or San Francisco. It'd be nice if there was just
one simple answer, it's this litany of factors that collectively add up that make this
so hard to pull off in the United States.
Well... that was depressing
Funny enough, the US has the world’s longest and best rail system. It’s renowned all over the world and other countries send their experts to try and help improve their own country’s rail systems. But it’s not passenger rail, it’s for freight trains.
The US doesn’t have high speed rail because the US doesn't lend itself well to passenger lines. The us railway grid is spectacular and exceedingly efficient when transporting cargo from hub to hub. When you haul freight, it's often better to go to a hub out of the way to load/unload. It's quite slow, but cost efficient overall.
But passenger lines are different, passengers want to get to their destination as fast as possible. They don't want to spend an extra 4 days on a train because it's cost effective to swing by Atlanta and pick up more stuff.
Passenger lines need to go directly from city to city, but that's incredibly inefficient. This is primarily because the United States is absolutely massive.
People say the US should emulate passenger train focused countries like Japan. Well, to put it in comparison, the entire country of Japan isn't even as big as the state of Montana.
To explain it another way, let's compare the US to countries who effectively use passenger trains:
Germany's 2 biggest cities are Berlin and Hamburg and they're 158 miles apart.
Japan's 2 biggest cities are Tokyo and Yokohama and they're 23 miles apart.
Italy's 2 biggest cities are Rome and Milan and they're 350 miles apart.
United States' 2 biggest cities are New York and Los Angeles and they're 2,800 miles apart.
It's just not feasible to use trains to travel directly such long distances. Rail is excellent for slow moving freight, but it makes way more sense to use air travel for passenger transport when you need to travel long distances.
The greed of the auto and oil industry has set us back 100 years. Its almost impossible to imagine how far better off we would be right now without them.
While many here have focused on the routes between cities, with a few exceptions in the northeast, US cities are more suburban sprawls than tight-knit urban areas. Public transportation in these areas is inconsistent and problematic to say the least. This means that once you arrive in a city, you still need personal transportation to get to your specific destination. The time and cost of renting a vehicle negates many of the advantages of an HSR system.
Adding to this video. BP estimates that at current 2017 levels of oil production, the world will run out of oil in 50.2 years. This is based on current proven oil reserves. Just something to think about. This may also be why Japan, China, and Many European countries have invested heavily in their train infrastructures.
Sauce: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/oil.html#oil-reserves
From the point of view of someone from abroad who studies these kinds of issues (that being me).
There are many levels to this situation and the USA is not alone in this. It's fantastic to have your own car. It's fast, you don't have to be close to strangers, it's comfortable, and since it's yours, you can go wherever you want. But the model does not scale well. When everybody has one, taking up a large area per person on every road, everything starts to slow down until the whole grid grinds to a halt. Regardless of how efficient a road layout and signalling is, when everybody has to go somewhere at the same time, it collapses. The system can be upgraded only up to a point, there is a limit on how much throughput the system can handle. There will come a point by which more road area will be needed than usable city area, which put in rough terms, you will eventually need a road as wide as ten city blocks and a parking lot as long and wide as the city itself. But since you razed the whole city to build these, there is no point to them because there no longer are any places to go to.
A great percentage of the urban growth in the USA happened in the 20th century, development centered around the whole automotive culture. Individual mobility allowed greater distances to be travelled and undermined public transportation, both factors that contributed to massive uncontrolled urban sprawl which in turn worsened the problem.
This is not to say cars are bad - they have many uses and benefits. The problem is giving cars the entire monopoly over human mobility. Each alternative solves a different problem and they don't have to trump each other, but the eternally competitive spirit of the USA refuses to see that.
Why the fuck am I writing this, nobody's going to read it.
TL;DR- Individual cars and suburbia may be nice but it's an inefficient model. Densification and several ranges of public transportation (local, medium, and long distance) are a much stronger and more efficient solution.
Also this shit happens in my country too. They neglected a vast rail network until it wasn't worth a fart. Now people are forced to have cars because the alternatives were mostly shut down.
High speed trains I the US? Amtrak and New Jersey transit struggle to stay organized and on time going 40mph. The Path Train to NYC has like 8 stops and the electronic displays on it are. Constantly indicating places it doesn’t go because it’s too complicated to account for weekday vs weekend schedules.
Trains are some of the oldest and most predictable modes of transport on Earth but the US is dead set on administrating them with sun dials and abacuses.
Because the USA is huge with major population zones all over the place. Also, people would rather go places themselves rather than stick to a regimented scheduled.
Isnt it sad how much humanity, as a whole, suffers because people are greedy? disappointed how much the corruption and greed of others can effect millions if not billions of people