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Location: Vinings/Cumberland in the evil county of Cobb
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Some of us liberal, tree-hugging, transit-loving SOB's often express our dissatisfaction with the current state of mass-transit in the Atlanta metro. As per the article it seems like our nation as a whole has fallen behind the times on the mass transit issue, especially hi-speed rail.
Every year I wonder if the experience of air travel can get any more unpleasurable before people demand another option, and then it does. It feels as though sometimes America is so enamored of our mid-20th-century achievements that we refuse to imagine the possibility that they're no longer the state of the art.
It's a good article, but it fails to mention that while Europe was able to (re)build its High Speed Network from the conventional speed networks that had always existed in some form, the U.S. will have to start from scratch. Except in the Northeast and Chicago and Los Angeles, no one has a conventional speed rail network we can just build off of, and even those networks aren't networks so much as spokes on a hub. If you look at a European Rail map, you'll see their passenger networks going everywhere. To apply the example to Atlanta, sure we'd have the spokes roughly following the interstates, but we'd also have cross-connects from say Lawrenceville up to Duluth and over to Alpharetta and Kennesaw where the rail backbones would serve stations served by tram lines in the busiest cities, and a robust bus network in the less dense cities as well as supplementing the tram lines in the denser cities (not this 25 minute headway garbage MARTA likes to force on us).
Part of the problem of trying to construct a national backbone of high speed rail is not only generating a market, but how to make those last mile connections that a robust local transit network should provide. Atlanta is on the low-end of moderate for that kind of "incoming" connectivity. In other words, a businessman coming into Atlanta is likely to be going to Downtown, Midtown, Buckhead, Perimeter, Roswell, Alpharetta, Cumberland or Marietta. Yes, there are other areas, but I believe these have the highest concentrations of companies which would likely have people coming into Atlanta for business purposes. For all but Cumberland and Marietta, Atlanta could be worse off, they all have a one-seat or two-seat ride from Downtown (train station?) and the airport, although last-mile connectivity still suffers a bit. Roswell and Alpharetta still require a connection to a local bus so they lose a few more points. Cumberland and Marietta are a joke to reach via transit.
To my first point about the market, the northeast has had continual rail service along all its lines including the northeast corridor backbone since they were first built. So the Acela becomes a natural evolution needed to serve the demand that is increasingly using rail service even before September 11, 2001. But that doesn't exist elsewhere. We're starting to see the expansion of conventional-speed regional service with the downstate Illinois services, St. Louis service, St. Louis-Kansas City service, the Charlotte-Raleigh service, Seattle-Portland Cascades service and the California services. Of those, only California has shown the huge demand necessary to begin thinking about the large next step to high speed rail and even then it's more a revolutionary step than an evolution of existing service since there is no direct Los Angeles-San Francisco rail service except the once a day Coast Starlight.
So what I'm so laboriously trying to get at is that while High Speed Rail is worth looking at and planning for, it is still worth bolstering and increasing the conventional speed rail services to make HSR truly worth the investment.
Just a reminder... the countries mentioned, with the exception of Russia and China are very small and trains make sense. The high speed rail in Russia is very limited between St Petersburg and Moscow and similar in nature to the northeast corridor. In China, it's a little more extensive, but China is a communist country, and while auto ownership and incomes are rising, there is not the same airline or highway infrastructure.
To me, when you consider the vast distances in the US that do not exist in western Europe and Japan, it's an apples to oranges comparison. A plane flies at 500+mph. The fastest HSTs like the TGV hit about 200mph.
I can be in LA or Seattle in 4-6 hours, NYC in 2.5 hours. Planes do not require fixed rights of way. There is no infrastructure to maintain beyond airports and the planes themselves. You can increase or cut flights to suit the needs of the public. New air routes can be spun up almost immediately, including internationally.
I get the desire to be like Europe for many of you, but the scale is completely different. Notice that Canada, with a much different political structure than the US also has not spent the money. Spanning a continent for millions of square miles is not the same as routes between capitals a hundred miles away in Europe.
Just a reminder... the countries mentioned, with the exception of Russia and China are very small and trains make sense. The high speed rail in Russia is very limited between St Petersburg and Moscow and similar in nature to the northeast corridor. In China, it's a little more extensive, but China is a communist country, and while auto ownership and incomes are rising, there is not the same airline or highway infrastructure.
To me, when you consider the vast distances in the US that do not exist in western Europe and Japan, it's an apples to oranges comparison. A plane flies at 500+mph. The fastest HSTs like the TGV hit about 200mph.
I can be in LA or Seattle in 4-6 hours, NYC in 2.5 hours. Planes do not require fixed rights of way. There is no infrastructure to maintain beyond airports and the planes themselves. You can increase or cut flights to suit the needs of the public. New air routes can be spun up almost immediately, including internationally.
I get the desire to be like Europe for many of you, but the scale is completely different. Notice that Canada, with a much different political structure than the US also has not spent the money. Spanning a continent for millions of square miles is not the same as routes between capitals a hundred miles away in Europe.
Just a reminder... the countries mentioned, with the exception of Russia and China are very small and trains make sense. The high speed rail in Russia is very limited between St Petersburg and Moscow and similar in nature to the northeast corridor. In China, it's a little more extensive, but China is a communist country, and while auto ownership and incomes are rising, there is not the same airline or highway infrastructure.
To me, when you consider the vast distances in the US that do not exist in western Europe and Japan, it's an apples to oranges comparison. A plane flies at 500+mph. The fastest HSTs like the TGV hit about 200mph.
I can be in LA or Seattle in 4-6 hours, NYC in 2.5 hours. Planes do not require fixed rights of way. There is no infrastructure to maintain beyond airports and the planes themselves. You can increase or cut flights to suit the needs of the public. New air routes can be spun up almost immediately, including internationally.
I get the desire to be like Europe for many of you, but the scale is completely different. Notice that Canada, with a much different political structure than the US also has not spent the money. Spanning a continent for millions of square miles is not the same as routes between capitals a hundred miles away in Europe.
Just a reminder... the countries mentioned, with the exception of Russia and China are very small and trains make sense. The high speed rail in Russia is very limited between St Petersburg and Moscow and similar in nature to the northeast corridor. In China, it's a little more extensive, but China is a communist country, and while auto ownership and incomes are rising, there is not the same airline or highway infrastructure.
To me, when you consider the vast distances in the US that do not exist in western Europe and Japan, it's an apples to oranges comparison. A plane flies at 500+mph. The fastest HSTs like the TGV hit about 200mph.
I can be in LA or Seattle in 4-6 hours, NYC in 2.5 hours. Planes do not require fixed rights of way. There is no infrastructure to maintain beyond airports and the planes themselves. You can increase or cut flights to suit the needs of the public. New air routes can be spun up almost immediately, including internationally.
I get the desire to be like Europe for many of you, but the scale is completely different. Notice that Canada, with a much different political structure than the US also has not spent the money. Spanning a continent for millions of square miles is not the same as routes between capitals a hundred miles away in Europe.
The scale is only different if you only look at across the width of the entire country. While one day we might have what amounts to coast-to-coast HSR, it will only exist because the smaller regional corridors were linked up. For example, Germany has several (nonstop) ICE trains per day running Hamburg to Munich. That's 481 miles, the train takes about 5.75 hours. That only averages 83mph!! That's quite a bit slower than I was actually expecting.
But using that 481 as some kind of North American baseline, let's look at the corridors that could be served by that.
Atlanta-Raleigh via Charlotte: 405 miles, 5 hours at 80mph average, 3.3 hours at 120mph average, 2.5 hours at 160mph average.
Charlotte-Washington via Raleigh: 400 miles, roughly the same times as above.
The existing NEC Boston-Washington is 438 miles with a minimum time of 6.5 hours or 67mph average.
Chicago-Washington via Pittsburgh: 700 miles, 8.75 hours at 80mph average, 5.8 hours at 120mph average, 4.375 at 160mph average.
We have corridors just like Europe, and just like Europe, ours would link up into a network spanning the 2800 miles coast to coast. The only real difference is we'd only be crossing state lines rather than international lines. Actually, ours would be smaller since Europe already links up with Russia and by extension China's network via the Trans-Siberian railroad. Lille, France (Channel Tunnel) to Vladivostok, Russia is about 7200 miles. New York to Los Angeles is about 2800 miles. Crossing the western part of our country might be a bit much since you have fewer intermediate destinations served by rail, but frankly, even that's doable and reasonable.
Just a reminder... the countries mentioned, with the exception of Russia and China are very small and trains make sense. The high speed rail in Russia is very limited between St Petersburg and Moscow and similar in nature to the northeast corridor. In China, it's a little more extensive, but China is a communist country, and while auto ownership and incomes are rising, there is not the same airline or highway infrastructure.
To me, when you consider the vast distances in the US that do not exist in western Europe and Japan, it's an apples to oranges comparison. A plane flies at 500+mph. The fastest HSTs like the TGV hit about 200mph.
I can be in LA or Seattle in 4-6 hours, NYC in 2.5 hours. Planes do not require fixed rights of way. There is no infrastructure to maintain beyond airports and the planes themselves. You can increase or cut flights to suit the needs of the public. New air routes can be spun up almost immediately, including internationally.
I get the desire to be like Europe for many of you, but the scale is completely different. Notice that Canada, with a much different political structure than the US also has not spent the money. Spanning a continent for millions of square miles is not the same as routes between capitals a hundred miles away in Europe.
And does the OP recognize that the American rail transport network (which is the standard for the world as far as freight is concerned) would have to be completely redesigned to provide the sort of service depicted in the upper photo?
Of the much-ballyhooed (but mostly by urbanites over there on the Left side of the aisle) High Speed Rail systems, only two (the French, because Paris dominates all the other urban areas and land was easily condemned for "public purposes", and Japan, because their nation was still in ruins when the idea was conceived in the Fifties) have a near complete new right-of-way. The German and Chinese systems have had to build around existing rail networks, at the cost of both technical obstacles and greater expense.
The lower picture does a disservice to the Acela system currently in use between Boston, New York and Washington; that technology has a top speed of 150 MPH, but it can be utilized safely only on a relatively small portion of the route -- ironically, the longest single portion of top-speed running is in, of all places, Rhode Island. The reasons are varied -- drawbridges along the Connecticut shore, antiquated tunnels in Baltimore, large stretches of track in major cities like New York and Philadelphia (though 110 MPH speeds are actually posted on the south side of Newark).
And one of the biggest problems is the electrical power system. Astute observers might notice that the catenary on the former New Haven system north of New York is somewhat closer to the rails and less formidable looking that that of the former Pennsylvania Railroad to the south. The wiring north of New Haven is near state-of-the-art, little more than than twenty years old, thus the higher speed limits.
The "ultimate solution" to the limitations of the current system would be a new right of way, bypassing Providence in favor of Hartford, and possibly using a route via South Jersey (one of two redundant Interstate grade highways could be converted) and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, with the "old" Northeast Corridor as a parallel feeder.
Anybody want to take a guess at the bill?
We have a similar system emerging in California, but again, the location and current density of traffic on the freight routes suggested for upgrade poses a problem, As with the Northeast Corridor, I expect a slow, "incremental" path of development involving fifty years or more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cqholt
America doesn't want to spend the money.
Unfortunately for the OP, very true!, in the eyes of many of us. A substantial portion of the American public still lives in rural areas where private autos (and the pickup trucks which make all the Politically Correct cringe) make a far better fit than the one daily Amtrak train like that in the lower picture and where, if service exists at all, it often passes through in the middle of the night. If the residents of these areas have to travel for medical care, etc, they usually can find a way.
The United States is one of only four nations (the others being Canada, China and the former Soviet Union) where the rail systems were designed primarily for freight, thus operating 24/7 and geared toward movement of heavy low-valued commodities. Most European nations, Great Britain being a prominent example, are situated so as to allow waterway shipping (coastal or barge canals) for much heavy freight, and trucking has evolved to take care of the rest. The rail systems of Europe are heavily-oriented toward passenger service which, in turn allows for a higher degree of maintenance in the off-peak hours, and attempts to move freight overnight have not met with much success, mostly because the cheaper line-haul cost for the short distances involved does not compensate for the need to transfer the merchandise from truck to railcar, and back again.
Nevertheless, as cited above, portions of the American rail system are evolving toward a better option for passengers in the limited areas for which it is economically feasible, and a Washington-Charlotte-Atlanta "corridor" is probably next on the list -- after the Northeast, California, and an evolving hub-and-spoke pattern centered on Chicago. But as already demonstrated, such dreams involve very careful planning, large amounts of capital, and very long lead times.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 03-17-2014 at 10:54 PM..
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often express our dissatisfaction with the current state of mass-transit in the Atlanta metro. As per the article it seems like our nation as a whole has fallen behind the times on the mass transit issue, especially hi-speed rail.
