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The 300 mile distance is ideal for high speed rail and there is a marked advantage over airplanes.
True, but there has to have been an ongoing commitment to passenger rail. For a variety of reasons, this has not happened in North America.
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Originally Posted by FrozenI69
The NYC to Toronto route has about the same population density as Milan to Rome, and both of those cities are connected by High speed rail.
Europe has maintained a commitment to rail. The USA has not. Trying to convert the current 12hr and 30min NYC to Toronto train time to even half that (car is roughly 7 hours) would cost well beyond any reasonable amount of money. Competing with jet travel is a losing battle.
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Originally Posted by FrozenI69
It’s also more convenient for someone traveling downtown to downtown for business purposes to use a train rather than take a taxi to Newark, get stuck in traffic, wait in line, get on a plane to Toronto Pearson, and sit in Toronto traffic to get into the city.
With the spread of commercial and residential real estate, center city travel to center city travel is less important than in previous generations.
NY metro is over 18 million people spread over 13k square miles. I live 15 miles north of NY Penn station in a NJ county (Bergen) with a population of 933k. It is about an hour to NY Penn via train, 1:20 via train to Newark Airport, but 35-45 minutes via car service to Newark Airport. I have done all three. When I lived in Manhattan, I used to take the subway to NY Penn and the train to Newark Airport for a flight. Maneuvering a small wheeled travel case on the subways sucked. There were periodic delays via rail that had to built into the trip to Newark Airport.
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Originally Posted by FrozenI69
And this is given there are no flight delays, which at NYC airports always happens. My dad now takes the train from Princeton to NoVA instead of flying there for a good reason. He can catch up with colleagues on the Acela instead of being harassed by the TSA and getting stuffed into a tube.
There are always delays in the NYC train system. One train breakdown in the tunnels under the Hudson and the Acela is not moving. Gov Christie of NJ killed the ARC tunnel project in 2010. If some random governor can kill a much needed commuter/Amtrak/Acela project that affects millions, how are you aver going to convince people to spend money on high speed rail?
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Originally Posted by FrozenI69
Also, if the US has enough money to fund war campaigns for oil, they can certainly divert that money to build sustainable public transit.
This is a tired old trope that has zero to do with funding high speed rail.
I think a route that includes Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Louisville would do pretty well.
That line sans Louisville initially was well on its way, but got tanked by Kasich as part of his campaign promise. Federal funds were committed and the slow speed that Kasich had campaigned against were initial projections that with later study ended up being substantially faster, but he had campaigned so hard against it that the line never materialized. It's sad because at that point, it wasn't yet obvious that Cleveland and Cincinnati were going to see their downtowns rebound and yet it happened. It also would have been much needed investment at the time since Ohio was hit pretty hard by the recession.
Getting Acela up to 160 mph the whole way between Boston and DC is the obvious enhancement. Connecticut rail infrastructure is a disgrace.
Northeast Corridor and California are the only places where high speed intercity rail make sense.
That does make sense, but the line needs to leave the CT shoreline for various reasons overall. The shoreline simply has too hard of a time expanding the right-of-way for more tracks, the bridges are too numerous and the route is way too winding as is to be able to handle substantially higher speeds without a significant amount of additional work.
I think it's pretty apparent that HSR can be done with a larger number of corridors than just the Northeast Corridor and California though those should be a priority. That's from comparing it to other places where HSR exists. The Vancouver-Seattle-Portland route is a good candidate with its main cities and cities in between. A Midwest HSR and Ohio 3C is good as is a NYC-Toronto route and possibly NYC-Montreal. Texas Triangle and Florida Atlantic coast are getting there as well especially as those cities add population, densify, and roll out incremental improvements to their mass transit network. However, I argue none of these are particularly low-hanging fruits.
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Originally Posted by Pike320
Connecticut has powerful and rich NIMBYs that will never allow the infrastructure to be upgraded.
Right, they won't let it be upgraded in terms of taking up more space in straightening the ROW along the shoreline. It's why I think the only way to make this work is to run an interior route meant specifically for longer distance true HSR. This also improves performance on the shoreline route by opening up the Acela slots for the New Haven Line and SLE.
True, but there has to have been an ongoing commitment to passenger rail. For a variety of reasons, this has not happened in North America.
Europe has maintained a commitment to rail. The USA has not. Trying to convert the current 12hr and 30min NYC to Toronto train time to even half that (car is roughly 7 hours) would cost well beyond any reasonable amount of money. Competing with jet travel is a losing battle.
With the spread of commercial and residential real estate, center city travel to center city travel is less important than in previous generations.
NY metro is over 18 million people spread over 13k square miles. I live 15 miles north of NY Penn station in a NJ county (Bergen) with a population of 933k. It is about an hour to NY Penn via train, 1:20 via train to Newark Airport, but 35-45 minutes via car service to Newark Airport. I have done all three. When I lived in Manhattan, I used to take the subway to NY Penn and the train to Newark Airport for a flight. Maneuvering a small wheeled travel case on the subways sucked. There were periodic delays via rail that had to built into the trip to Newark Airport.
There are always delays in the NYC train system. One train breakdown in the tunnels under the Hudson and the Acela is not moving. Gov Christie of NJ killed the ARC tunnel project in 2010. If some random governor can kill a much needed commuter/Amtrak/Acela project that affects millions, how are you aver going to convince people to spend money on high speed rail?
This is a tired old trope that has zero to do with funding high speed rail.
The relative lack of investment in intercity passenger rail in the US over the last several decades seems like an odd reason to not invest more in intercity passenger rail in the US. It’s certainly not going to get better by maintaining or lessening the amount of investment, but I understand the gist of it. There’s a network effect in Europe and elsewhere where there’s already a large tie-in to existing services and infrastructures that greatly enhance the benefit from additional extensions. That’s sort of what I’m going for in this topic in regards to low-hanging fruit. A lot of the other ones mentioned in this topic are more of an investment, so a higher bar for low-hanging fruit, but so far most seem pretty reasonable. Those improvements also potentially act as a scaffolding for making even more future investments have a better bang for the buck.
For a NYC-Toronto line, halving the time certainly wouldn’t mean having top-of-the-line HSR, but it can still be fruitful since train services have multiple stops. It wouldn’t be solely the NYC-Toronto pair, but the combination of all city pairs along the route. It’s that combination that pushes the line to be worthwhile.
Center city to center city travel is still important as many major institutions are within city centers and a good chunk of population is still found near city centers. As for the Portal Bridge and the second pair of tunnels needed under the Hudson—yea, there needs to be more investment to minimize delays in both their frequency and magnitude. I’m totally onboard with that. Princeton to NOVA has pretty good performance though.
The amount of money poured down the drain for an unnecessary war was massive, but I agree that it wasn’t solely HSR funding that could have gone towards instead. What’s done is done, but hopefully we learned something of value from that blunder. Regardless, there are some low and high hanging fruits in terms of passenger rail investment that are sensible.
One good thing in recent years is that FRA reforms have made regulations for passenger rail rolling stock much closer to what’s found in Europe. Essentially, it’s like with US vehicle crash standards where it takes into consideration crumple zones for vehicles rather than just going on sheer weight classes. This means that trains for US passenger rail don’t need to be built like heavy brick ****houses that they were required to be in the past, but more like the much lighter rolling stock used in Europe. This means the trains can be substantially lighter than the ones today which saves on fueling costs, brake maintenance, track maintenance, and cost of the rolling stock itself and can accelerate to top operating speed substantially faster for the same power output. Moreover, going on something akin to the network effect mentioned earlier, US passenger rail can now use European rolling stock designs with substantially less alteration and thus lower costs.
Here are two things I'd like to see on all Amtrak lines:
1. Double-tracking. One big issue that negatively impacts both travel speed and on-time performance is having to share single tracks with freight railroads. Inevitably, it's the passenger train that has to pull over and wait when there's a conflict. With two parallel tracks (one for each direction of travel), trains won't have to wait for oncoming trains to pass, and they'll be able to travel faster on their own tracks.
2. High-level platforms. Many (most?) Amtrak stations have low-level platforms, so people have to step up several small steps, luggage in hand, to board the train. This may only cost a few extra seconds per person, but multiply it by tens or dozens of people at each station, all up and down the line, and you're looking at a decent amount of wasted "dwell time." Not to mention, it's just easier to board a train from a high platform than a low one.
Do these two things, and you'll see the reliability improve, the travel speeds increase, and customer satisfaction improve. All of these things can't help but result in ridership growth.
Another issue is that, on the long-distance trains, some stations are served only at inconvenient times late at night. On the Lake Shore Limited, for example, important cities like Syracuse, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, and Toledo are only served at night. Adding a second daily train, timed to operate roughly 12 hours apart from the existing one, could make this route a lot more convenient for riders in those cities.
And finally . . . how is it that there isn't a direct train from the great midwestern hub of Chicago to the great vacationland of Florida? Bonus points for getting Chattanooga, Nashville, and Louisville onto the system map.
I realize that these improvements wouldn't be cost-free. But when compared to the astronomical costs of constructing a true high-speed rail system, I think that they would actually provide more bang for the buck.
Kansas City, MO - Lawrence, KS - Topeka, KS: there's already service here on a long distance route via the Southwest Chief, so the tracks and stations are there and we can get an idea of fares and trip duration via the Southwest Chief's service. This route has a state capital, a college town, and the region's largest city at distances that are fantastic for passenger rail and with stations fairly close to their urban centers. Compared to bus service on this route, the train fare is comparable, the trip time is shorter, and train rides are generally a lot more comfortable than bus (or car) rides. However, the Southwest Chief serves these three cities at rather inopportune times. To me, what would make sense is to extend the Missouri River Runner service to these cities as well, so that daytrips among these as well as among other Missouri River Runner cities would be doable. There would need to be no track changes for this, but in order to retain something like current timetables for the current line with the extension, there may need be one additional roundtrip service and maybe some track improvement for speeding up parts of the current route within Missouri.
I know another poster threw cold water on this one because (at Kansas Turnpike speeds) the entire distance can be covered by car in an hour or less, but I'm with you on this, especially as an extension of the Missouri River Runner.
And the beauty of this idea is, the only people you really need to convince that this is worthwhile are the folks who run the Kansas Department of Transportation. However: That may be more difficult than you might imagine, for the service would not only compete with the intercity buses but also draw some motorists off the Kansas Turnpike.
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